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PEDAGOGY
OF HOPE

BOOKS BY PAULO FREIRE
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Education for Critical Consciousness

Pedagogy in Process
The Letters to Guinea-Bissau

Learning to Question
A Pedagogy of Liberation
(with Antonio Faundez)

Pedagogy of the City

PAULO FREIRE

PEDAGOGY
OF HOPE

Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed

With Notes by Ana Maria Aratjo Freire

Translated by Robert R. Barr

Thomas J. Beta Lib ary
TRENT UNIV cesitt
PETERBOROUGH, ONIANIG

CONTINUUM «© NEW YORK

1994
The Continuum Publishing Company
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Copyright © 1992 by Paulo Freire
English translation Copyright © 1994 by The Continuum Publishing Company

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or

by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of

The Continuum Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freire, Paulo, 1921-

{Pedagogfa da esperanca. English]

Pedagogy of hope : reliving Pedagogy of the oppressed / Paulo
Freire ; notes by Ana Maria Aratijo Freire ; translated by Robert R.
Barr.

Dp. cm.

Translation of: Pedagogfa da esperanca.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8264-0590-8

1. Freire, Paulo, 1921- . 2. Education—Philosophy. 3. Popular
education—Philosophy. 4. Education—Social aspects—Latin America.
5. Education—Social aspects—Brazil. 6. Freire, Paulo, 192J—
Pedagogfa do oprimido. I. Freire, Ana Maria Araijo, 1933—
IL Freire, Paulo, 1921— Pedagogfa do oprimido. English.
IIL Title.
LB880.F732P432 1994
370’. 1—dc20 93-44911

CIP

For Ana Maria, Nita,
who gave me back a taste for life:
when life seemed so long to me,
so nearly hopeless... .
I looked at her!

Paulo

In memory of Armando Neves Freire,
excellent brother, fine friend
Paulo

For

Stela

Bruno

Silvia

Temistocles

and Reinilda

With a brotherly embrace
Paulo

For Genove Aratijo,
hopeful as a teenager, at ninety—
whom I can never pay what I owe,
lovingly,

Paulo

For

Zé de Melo and Dora

for reasons beyond counting

with an embrace from their friend
Paulo

Opening Words

e are surrounded by a pragmatic discourse that would
ave us adapt to the facts of reality. Dream, and utopia,
are called not only useless, but positively impeding. \
(After all, they are an intrinsic part of any educational practice with~
the power to unmask the dominant lies.) It may seem strange, then,
that I should write a book called Pedagogy of Hope: Pedagogy of
the Oppressed Revisited.

But for me, on the contrary, the educational practice of a progres-
sive option will never be anything but an adventure in unveiling. It
will always be an experiment in bringing out the truth. Because this
is the way I have always thought, there are those who dispute
whether or not I am an educator. )It happened recently in a meeting
at UNESCO in Paris—I have been told by someone who was there.
Latin American representatives refused to ascribe me the standing
of educator. At least I was not an educator as far as they were con-
cerned. And they criticized me for what seemed to them to be my
exaggerated “politicization. ”

They failed to perceive that, in denying me the status of educator
for being “too political,” they were being as political as L Of course,
on opposite sides of the fence. “Neutral” they were not, nor could
ever be.

On the other hand, there must be countless individuals who think
the way a friend of mine, a university professor, thinks. He came
looking for me. In astonishment, he asked, “But Paul . . . a Peda-
gogy of Hope in the shameless hellhole of corruption like the one
strangling us in Brazil today?”

The fact is that the “democratization” of the shamelessness and

§ + PAULO FREIRE

corruption that is gaining the upper hand in our country, contempt
for the common good, and crimes that go unpunished, have only
broadened and deepened as the nation has begun to rise up in
protest. Even young adults and teenagers crowd into the streets,
criticizing, calling for honesty and candor. The people cry out
against all the crass evidence of public corruption. The public
squares are filled once more. There is a hope, however timid, on
the street corners, a hope in each and every one of us. It is as if
most of the nation had been taken by an uncontainable need to

vomit at the sight of all this shamefulness.

On the other hand—while I certainly cannot ignore hopelessness ‘, 7

as a concrete entity, nor turn a blind eye to the historical, economic,
and social reasons that explain that hopelessness—I do not under-
stand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve it, apart
from hope and dream.(Hope is an ontological need. Hopelessness
is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of
that ontological neat)
_ When it becomes a program, hopelessness paralyzes us, immobi-
lizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible
to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that
will re-create the worid.

I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existen-
tial, concrete imperative.

I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute to this hope
of mine the power to transform reality all by itself, so that I set
out for the fray without taking account_of concrete, material data,

declaring, “My hope is enough!” No/(my hope is necessary, but it

is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle
will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope\the way a fish needs

-unpolluted water.) er

_ The idea-that hope alone will transform the world, and action
undertaken in that kind of naiveté, is an excellent route to hope-
lessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without
hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could
be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach,
is a frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based
on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tanta-
mount to denying that struggle one of its mainstays. The essential

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE « 9

thing, as I maintain later on, is this: hope, as an ontological need,

demands an anchoring in pesca release ico, hope
needs practice_in_order_to-become-historical concreteness...That is
why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not
attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain,/
‘Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the
struggle. But without the struggle, hope, as an ontological need,
dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. And hope-
lessness can become tragic despair. Hence the need for a kind of
education in hope,) Hope, as it happens, is so important for our
existence, individual and social, that we must take every care not to
experience it in a mistaken form, and thereby allow it to slip toward
hopelessness and despair, Hopelessness and despair are both the. +
consequence and the cause of inaction or immobilism. | Y
In limited situations, beyond which lies “untested feasibility”
alone'—sometimes perceivable, sometimes not—we find the why
of both_positions: the hopeful one and the hopeless one. :
‘One of the tasks of the progressive educator, through a serious, ; te
correct political analysis, is to_unveil opportunities for hope, no ack :.
matter what the obstacles may be.) After all, without hope there is a
little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight ~
as hopeless or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal. We
shall be beside ourselves, drop our weapons, and throw ourselves
into sheer hand-to-hand, purely vindictive, combat. Of course, the
- element of punishment, penalty, correction—the punitive element
in the struggle we wage in our hope, in our conviction of its ethical
and historical rightness—belongs to the pedagogical nature of the
political process of which struggle is an expression. It would not be
equitable that injustices, abuses, extortion, illicit profits, influence
peddling, the use of offices and positions for the satisfaction of per-
sonal interests—all of these things that make up the reason for
which, with justifiable anger, we now struggle in Brazil—should go
uncorrected, just as it would not be right for any of those who would
be judged guilty not to be severely punished, within the limits of
the law. ee
It will not do—it is not a valid argument—simply to admit that
none of this is a “privilege” of the Third World, as we sometimes
hear it suggested. Yes, the First World has indeed always been an

guy"
> ok

\,

10 + PAULO FREIRE

example of scandals of every sort, always a model of wickedness, of
exploitation. We need only think of colonialism—of the massacres
of invaded, subjugated, colonized peoples; of the wars of this cen-
tury, of shameful, cheapening racial discrimination, and the rapine
that colonialism has perpetrated. No, we have no monopoly on the
dishonorable. But we can no longer connive with the scandals that
wound us in our remotest depths.

What cynicism—just to take one example among dozens—that
certain politicians should seek to conceal their doings from their
constituents (who have an absolute right to know what is done in
Congress and why), and defend, with puritanical airs, in the name
of democracy, some right to hide out in a “secret ballot” during a
presidential vote of confidence! Why hide, unless there is at least
some minimal risk to one’s physical well-being? Why is concealment
solemnly dubbed the “purity,” “honorableness,” “unassailability” of
the president? Let these politicians have the dignity to assume re-
sponsibility for their option. Let them come right out with their
defense of the indefensible.

Pedagogy of Hope is that kind of book. It is written in rage and
love, without which there is no hope. It is meant as a defense of
_tolerance—not to be confused with connivance—and radicalness. It
is meant as a criticism of sectarianism. It ‘attempts to explain and
defend progressive postmodernity and it will reject conservative,
neoliberal postmodernity.

The first step I shall ake will be to analyze or speak of the fabric,
the texture, the very strands, of the infancy, youth, and budding
maturity in which Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I “revisit” in
this book, came to be proclaimed, first in oral form and then in
writing.

Some of these strands, these threads, will end with my exile,
into which I go with a soul steeped in history—the cultural marks,
memories, feelings, and sentiments, doubts, dreams that never got
off the drawing board but were never abandoned—and longings, of
my world, my sky, the tepid waters of the Atlantic, the “improper
language of the people, the correct language of the people.”* I ar-

*Manuel Bandeira, “Evocacao do Recife,” in Poesias, 6th ed. (Rio de Janeiro:
José Olympio, 1955), p. 191.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE : ll

rived in exile, and reached the memory I bore in my soul of so
many intertwined threads; there I came to be marked and stamped
by new facts, new knowledge, and these wove new experiences, as
in a tapestry.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed emerges from all of this, and I shall
speak now of that book—of how I learned while I wrote it, and
indeed, of how, while first speaking of this pedagogy, I was learning
to write the book.

Then, in a second step in this present book, I shall return to
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I shall discuss some of its stages, and
analyze certain criticisms leveled against it in the 1970s.

In the third and final step in this book, I shall speak at length of
the threads and the fabrics whose essence, as it were, was Pedagogy
of the Oppressed itself. Here I shall practically relive—and basically,
shall actually be reliving—and as I do so, rethink, certain special
moments in my journeys through the four corners of the earth, to
which I was carried by Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Perhaps, how-
ever, I should make it clear to readers that, in taking myself back
to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and in speaking today of the tapestry
of my experience in the 1970s, I do not intend to wallow in nostalgia.
Instead, my reencounter with Pedagogy of the Oppressed will have
the tone of one who speaks not of what has been, but of what is.

The facts, the debates, the discussions, the projects, the experi-
ments, the dialogues in which I shared in the 1970s, all bearing on
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, seem to me to be as current as do
others to which I shall refer, of the 1980s and today.

I should now like, in these opening words, to thank a group of
friends, in Brazil and abroad, with whom, even before beginning to
work on this Pedagogy of Hope, 1 held conversations about this
project, and from whom I received such important encouragement:

Ana Maria Freire, Madalena Freire Weffort, Maria de Fatima
Freire Dowbor, Lutgardes Freire, Ladislau Dowbor, Celso Beisie-
gel, Ana Maria Saul, Moacir Gadotti, Antonio Chizzotti, Adriano
Nogueira, Marcio Campos, Carlos Arguelo, Eduardo Sebastiani Fer-
reira, Addo J. Cardoso, Henry Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, Peter Park,
Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, Stanley Aroniwitz, Rat! Magaria, Joao
Batista F. Pinto, Michael Apple, Madeleine Groumet, Martin Car-

12 - PAULO FREIRE

noy, Carlos Torres, Eduardo Hasche, Alma Flor Ada, Joaquim
Freire, Susanne Mebes, Cristina Freire Heiniger, and Alberto
Heiniger.

I should also like to express my thanks to my wife, Ana Maria
Freire, for the excellent notes appended here, which clarify and
anchor important elements in my text. Superscripts in the text refer
to her numbered endnotes at the back of the book. Asterisks, on
the other hand, refer to footnotes at the bottom of the page.

Iam likewise aware of my indebtedness to Suzie Hartmann Lontra,
who so patiently and devotedly proofread the typescript with me.

Nor must I omit to express my gratitude to Werner Mark Linz,
for the enthusiasm with which he has always discussed this project
with me, whether face-to-face or in our correspondence—that same
enthusiasm with which, twenty-four years ago, he read the manu-
script of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and published it.

Finally, to Marcus Gasparian, one of the finest and most sensitive
publishers in Brazil today, I send a brotherly embrace and a “Thank
you very much’ for the taste with which he constantly discussed with
me what would come to be Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of
the Oppressed.

Paulo Freire
Sao Paulo
January 1994

CHAPTER

l

the same school where I had completed my secondary educa-
tion And, also, as a peg! favor of the school’s director, Dr.
Aluizio ngs de Aratijo,? my preparatory course for law school. ‘It
was at that time that(I received the invitation to become part of
the recently created Industrial Social Service, SESI, the Regional
Department of Pernambuco, )set up by the National Industrial Con-
federation and given legal status by presidential decree.°
The invitation was transmitted through a great friend of mine and
fellow alumnus of Colégio Oswaldo Cruz, a person to whom I am
bound by close ties of friendship, which our political disagreements
have never disturbed, to this very day. Our disagreements had to
be. They expressed our diverging views of the world, and our under-
standing of life itself. We have got through some of the most difficult
moments of our lives tempering our disagreements, thereby de-
fending our right and our duty to preserve mutual love by ensuring
that it will rise above our political options and ideological positions.
Without our knowing it, at the time, we were already—each in his
or her own way—postmodern! In fact, in our mutual respect, we
were actually experiencing the rock-bottom foundation of politics.
His name is Paulo Rangel Moreira. Today he is an attorney of
renown, and professor of law at the Federal University of Pernam-
buco.® One bright afternoon in Recife, he came to our house in the
Casa Forte district, 224 Rita de Souza Street, and told us—Elza,
my first wife, and me—of SESI's existence and what it could mean

I 1947 I was teaching Portuguese at Colégio Oswaldo Cruz, 2

—

avn pREMRE
for us. He had already accepted the invitation extended to him by
the young president of the organization, engineer and industrialist
Cid Sampaio, to coordinate its social service projects. Every indica-
tion was that he would soon move to the legal department of the
organization—his dream—to work in the field of his own expertise.

I listened, we listened—silent, curious, reticent, challenged—to
Paulo Rangel’s optimistic discourse. We were a little afraid, too, Elza
and J. Afraid of the new, perhaps. But there was also within us a
willingness and a taste for risk, for adventure.

Night was “falling.” Night had “fallen.” In Recife, night “arrives”
suddenly. The sun is “surprised” to find itself still shining, and
makes a run for it, as if there were no time to lose.

Elza flicked on the light. “And what will Paul do in this organiza-
tion?” she asked. “What will it be able to offer Paul besides the
salary he needs? How will he be able to exercise his curiosity, what
creative work will he be able to devote himself to so that he wont
die of sadness and longing for the teaching job he likes so much?”

We were in our last year of law school, in the middle of the school
year. Something had already happened, right about the time of the
invitation, that was to become very important in my life. I have
already referred to it in interviews, and it has been mentioned in
biographical notes in books and periodicals. It had made Elza laugh
with satisfaction at seeing something happen that she had almost
guessed would happen—something she had counted on happening
since the beginning of our life together. At the same time, her laugh
was a pleasant one, without anything like “I told you so” about it,
but just full-to-the-brim of gladness.

J had come home at the end of the day with the tasty sensation
of someone correcting a mistake he or she has been making. Open-
ing the door, Elza asked me a question that, on so many people's
lips, is not much more than a kind of bureaucratic formality, but
which when asked by Elza was always a genuine question, never
a rote formula. It expressed lively curiosity, and betokened true
investigation. She asked, “Everything all right at the office today?”

And I told her about the experience that had put an end to my
brand-new career as a lawyer. I really needed to talk. I needed to

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 15

recite, word for word, what I had just told the young dentist I had
sitting in front of me in my very new office. Shy, frightened, nervous,
his hands moving as if suddenly unhooked from his mind, detached
from his conscious body, and become autonomous, and yet unable
to do anything “on their own,” do anything with-themselves, or
connect with the words that tumbled out of his mouth (God knows
how)—the young dentist had said something to me that I needed
to speak with Elza about at once. I needed to talk with Elza at that
special moment, just as in other, equally special moments in the
course of our life. I needed to speak of the spoken, of the said and
the not said, of the heard, of the listened to. To speak of the said is
not only to resay the said, but to relive the living experience that
has generated the saying that now, at the time of the resaying, is
said once more. Thus, to resay, to speak of the said, implies hearing
once again what has been said by someone else about or because of |
the saying that we ourselves have done.

“Something very exciting happened to me this afternoon—just a
few minutes ago, I said to Elza. “You know what? I’m not going to
be a lawyer. It's not that I see nothing special, nothing captivating,
about law. Law is a a basic need. It’s a job that has to be done, and
just as much as anything else, it has to be based on ethics, and
competence, and seriousness, and respect for people. But law isnt
what I want.” Then I spoke of what had been, of things experienced,
of words, of meaningful silences, of the said, of the heard. Of the
young dentist before me whom IJ had invited to come talk with me
as his creditors attorney. The young man had set up his dental
office, at least partially, and had not paid his debts.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I guess I was overoptimistic. I took
out a loan I cant pay back. But I'm legally required to have certain
instruments in order to practice dentistry. So, well, sir, . . . you can
take our furniture, in the dining room, the living room. . .” And
then, laughing a shy laugh, without the trace of a sneer—with as
much humor as irony—he finished up: “ .. . Only you cant have
my eighteen-month-old baby girl.”

I had listened in silence. I was thinking. Then I said to him, “I
think you and your wife and your little girl and your dining room and
your living room are going to sit in a kind of suspended animation for

16 - PAULO FREIRE

a while, as far as your debt-troubles are concerned. I'm going to
have to wait till next week to see my client and tell him I'm dropping
the case. It'll take him another week or so to get another down-and-
outer like me to be his attorney. This will give you a little breathing
space, even if it is just suspended animation. Id also like to tell you
that, like you, I’m closing down my career before it’s even gotten
started. Thanks.”

The young man, of my own generation, may for all I know have
left my office without much of a grasp of what had been said and
heard. I squeezed his cold hand warmly with mine. Once he was
home again and had thought over what had been said, who knows,
he might have begun to understand some of the reasons that had
led me to say what I had said.

That evening, relaying to Elza what had been said, I could never
have imagined that, one day, so many years later, I would write
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whose discourse, whose proposal, has
something to do with the experience of that afternoon, in terms of
what it, too, meant, and especially in terms of the decision to accept
Cid Sampaios invitation, conveyed to me by Paulo Rangel. I aban-
doned the practice of law for good that afternoon, once I had heard
Elza say, “I was hoping for that. Youre an educator.” Not man
months after, as the night that had arrived in such haste Dena
said yes to SESI's summons to its Division of Education and Culture,
whose field of experience, study, reflection, and practice was to be-
come an indispensable moment in the gestation of Pedagogy of
the Oppressed.

~ Never does afi event, a fact, a deed, a gesture of rage or love, a
poem, a painting, a song, a book, have only one reason behind it.
In fact, a deed, a gesture, a poem, a painting, a song, a book are
always wrapped in thick wrappers. They have been touched by mani-
fold whys. Only some of these are close enough to the event or the
creation to be visible as whys. And so I have always been more
interested in understanding the process in and by which things

, come about than in the product in itself.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed could not have gestated within me
solely by reason of my stint with SESI. But my stint with SESI
was fundamental to its development. Even before Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, my time with SESI wove a tapestry of which Pedagogy

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 17

was a kind of inevitable extension. I refer to the dissertation I de-
fended in what was then the University of Recife, and later the
Federal University of Pernambuco: “Educacao e atualidade brasi-
leira.” I later reworked my dissertation and published it as Educacdo
como pratica da liberdade, and that book basically became the fore-
runner of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Again, in interviews, in dialogues with intellectuals, including
non-Brazilians, I have made references to more remote tapestries
that enveloped me, by bits and pieces, from my childhood and
adolescence onward, antedating my time with SESI, which was
without any doubt a “founding time,” a foundational time.

These bits and pieces of time actually lived in me—for I had lived
them—awaiting another time, which might not even have come as
it came, but into which, if it did come, earlier bits and pieces of
time were destined to extend, in the composition of the larger fabric.

At times, it happens to us not to perceive the “kinship” among |
the times we have experienced, and thus to let slip the opportunity
to “solder together” disconnected cognitions, and in so doing to
allow the second to shed light on the doubtful brilliance of the first. ,

here was my experience of infancy and adolescence with young-
sters who were the children of rural and urban workers, my life as
a child with children whose opportunities for life were so utterly
minimal, the way in which most of their parents treated us;—Temis-
tocles, my immediately elder brother, and me—their “fear of free-
dom,” which I never understood, nor called it this at the time,thei
subservient attitude toward their employers, the boss, the na
which later, much later, I read in Sartre was one of the expressions
of the “connivance” of the oppressed with the oppressors.* There
were their oppressed bodies, the unconsulted hosts of the oppres-
sors parasitism.

It is interesting, in a context of childhood and adolescence, in the
connivance maintained with the wickedness of the powerful—with
the weakness that needed to turn into the strength of the domi-
nated—that the time of SESI’s foundation, that time of “solderings”
and “splicings” of old, pure “guesses,” to which my new knowledge

*Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon, Os condenados da Terra (Rio de
Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira).

18 + PAULO FREIRE

with its critical emergence gave meaning, was the moment at which
I read the why, or some of the whys—the tapestries and fabrics that
were books already written and not yet read by me, and of
books yet to be written that would come to enlighten the vivid
memory that was forming me: Marx, Lukdécs, Fromm, Gramsci,

Fanon, Memmi, Sartre, Kosik, Agnes Heller, M. Ponty, Simon Weil,
Arendt, Marcuse, and so many others.

Years later, the putting into practice of some of the “solderings™
and “splicings” of the inaugural years of SESI sent me into exile’—
a kind of “golden spike” that enabled me to connect recollections,
recognize facts, deeds, and gestures, fuse pieces of knowledge, sol-
der moments, re-cognize in order to cognize, to know, better.

In this effort to recall moments of my experience—which neces-
sarily, regardless of when they were, became sources of my theoreti-
cal reflections for the writing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as they
would continue to be today, as I rethink Pedagogy—I feel that it
will be appropriate to refer to an excellent example of such a mo-
ment, which I experienced in the 1950s. The experience resulted
in a learning process of real importance for me—for my theoretical
understanding of the practice of political education, which, if it is
to be progressive, must, as I have always asserted, take careful ac-
count of the reading of the world being made by popular groups
and expressed in their discourse, their syntax, their semantics, their
dreams and desires.

I was now working in SESI, and specifically on relations between
schools and families. I had begun to experiment with various ave-
nues to an improvement of the meeting of minds: to an understand-
ing of the educational practice being carried out in the schools, on
the part of families; to an understanding of the difficulties that fami-
lies from popular areas would have in confronting problems in the
implementation of their own educational activity. At bottom, I was
looking for a dialogue between them from which might result the
necessary mutual assistance that, at the same time—as it would
imply more involvement of the families in the school—might en-
hance the political connotation of that involvement in the sense of
opening channels of democratic participation to fathers and mothers
n the actual educational policy being implemented in the schools.

I had carried out, by that time, a research project covering some

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 19

one thousand families of students, throughout the urban area of
Recife, the Zona da Mata, the countryside,|and what might be called
the “doorway” to the desert hinterland of Pernambuco,® where SESI
had nuclei or social centers in which it offered its members and
their families medical and dental assistance, scholastic help, sports
and recreation projects, cultural projects, and so on.

[My research, which had nothing of the sophisticated about it,
asked the parents questions about their relationship with their
daughters and sons. \I asked about punishments, rewards, the most
frequent punishments, the most frequent reasons for it, their chil-
dren's reaction to the punishment, any change in their behavior,
or want thereof, in the direction desired by the person doing the
punishing, and so on.

I recall that, when I had sifted through the results| I was aston-
ished, even more than I had expected to be, at the emphasis on
corporal punishment, really violent punishment, in the Recife inner
city, the Zona da Mata, in the rural areas, and hinterland, by contrast
with the almost complete absence, not only of violent corporal pun-
ishment, but of any punishment of children, along the fishing coast.
It seemed that, along the coast, under the maritime sky, the legends
of individual freedom with which the culture is drenched, the fish-
ers confrontation, in their precarious jangadas or rafts,? with the
forces of the sea, the independent jobbers work done by persons
free and proud, the imagination that lends such color to the fishers
fantastic stories—it seemed that all of this had some connection with
the taste for a liberty diametrically opposed to the use of violent
punishment.

I do not know myself to what extent we might consider the fishers
lifestyle too permissive, wanting boundaries, or whether, on the
contrary, with their emphasis on freedom, and conditioned by their
own cultural context, the fishers are simply relying on nature itself,
on the world, on the sea, in and with which their children they win
an experience of themselves, to be the source of freedom’s necessary
limits. It was as if, softening or trimming down their duty as their
children’s educators, fathers and mothers shared them with the sea,
with the world itself, to which it would fall, through their children’s
practice, to delineate their responsibilities. In this fashion, the chil-

20 - PAULO FREIRE

dren would be expected to learn naturally what they might and
_might not do.

Indeed, the fishers lived a life of enormous contradiction. On one
side, they felt free and bold, confronting the sea, in fellowship with
its mysteries, doing what they called “scientific fishing,”!° of which
they had spoken to me in the sunsets when, relaxing with them in
their primitive shelters, their caicgaras,!' I learned to understand
them better by listening to them. On the other hand, they were
viciously plundered, exploited, now by the middlemen who bought
for nothing the product of their hard labor, now by the moneylenders
who financed their work tools.

Sometimes, as I listened to them—in my conversations with them
in which I learned something of their syntax and semantics, without
which I could not have worked with them, or at any rate not effec-
tively—I wondered whether they didnt perhaps notice how unfree
they really were.

I recall that, in the fishing season, we delved into the reason why
various students were missing school so frequently. Students and
parents, separately, replied. The students, “Because were free.” The
parents, “Because theyre free. They'll go back some day.”

Punishments in the other areas of the state that I researched
ranged from tying a child to a tree, locking them in a room for hours
on end, giving them “cakes” with thick, heavy switches, forcing
them to kneel on stones used to grind corn, thrashing them with
leather straps. This last was the principal punishment in a town of
the Zona da Mata that was famous for its shoemaking.

These punishments were applied for trivial reasons, ang mag

I acknowledge the risks to which we expose ourselves in confront-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 2l

ing such problems. On the one hand, there is the danger of volunta-
will of the individual with the power to do all things. On the other
hand, there is the peril of a mechanistic objectivism that refuses to
ascribe any role to ‘subjectivity in the historical process.

Both of these conceptions of history, and of human beings in that ’
history, end by definitively canceling the role of education. The first,
because it attributes to education a power that it does not have; the
second, because it denies that it has any power at all. i

[As for the relationship between authority and freedom—the sub-
ject of the research project that I have mentioned—we also run
the risk either of denying freedom the right to assert itself, thus }
exacerbating the role of authority; or else of atrophying the latter
and thus hypertrophying the former.| In other words, fwe run the
risk of succumbing to the seduction or tyranny of liberty, or to the
tyranny of authority, thus acting at cross-purposes, in either hy-
pothesis, with our incipient democracy.

This was not my position then and it is not my position now.
And today as yesterday, while on perhaps better foundations than |
yesterday,/I am completely persuaded of the importance, the ur-
gency, of the democratization of the public school, and of the ongo-
ing training of its educators, among whom I include security people,
cafeteria personnel, and custodians, and so on. Their formation must
be ongoing and scientific. | Nor should it fail to instill a taste for
democratic practices, among which should be an ever more active
intervention on the part of educands and their families as to which
direction the school is going. This has been one of the tasks to
which I have devoted myself recently, so many years after having
first observed this need, and spoken of it in my 1959 academic
treatise, “Educacdo e atualidade brasileira,” to address it again as
secretary of education for the City of S40 Paulo from January 1989
to May 1991. Here is the challenge of the democratization of the
public school, so neglected by the military governments!® that, in
the name of the salvation of the country from the curse of commu-
nism and from corruption, all but destroyed that country.

Finally, with the results of my study in hand, I scheduled a kind
of systematic visitation of all of the SESI nuclei or social centers in
the state of Pernambuco where we maintain primary schools,"* as

PAULO FREE
they were called at the time, to go there and speak to the parents
about the findings of the inquiry. And to do something more: to
join to communication of the findings of the investigation a discus-
sion about the problem of the relationship between authority and
freedom, which would necessarily involve the question of punish-
ment and reward in education.

The tour for discussion with the families was preceded by another,
which I made in order to debate, in seminars as rigorous as it was
possible to have, the same question with teachers.

I had put together—in collaboration with a colleague, Jorge Mon-
teiro de Melo, recently deceased, whose seriousness, honesty, and
devotion I now reverence—an essay on scholastic discipline, which,
alongside the results of the study, became the object of our prepara-
tory seminar in our meetings with the families. In this fashion, we

‘prepared ourselves, as a school, to welcome the students families—
the natural educators of those of whom we were the professional
educators.

Back then, I was accustomed to give long talks on the subjects
that had been selected. I was repeating the traditional route of dis-
course about something that you would give an audience. Then I
would shift the format to a debate, discussion, dialogue about the
subject with the participants. And, while I was concerned about the
order and development of ideas, I proceeded almost as if I were
speaking to university students. I say, “almost,” because actually my
sensitivity had already made me aware of the differences in lan-
guage, the syntactical and semantic differences, between the work-
ing persons with whom I was working and my own language. Hence
my talks were always punctuated with, “In other words,” or, “That
is to say. . .. On the other hand, despite some years of experience
as an educator, with urban and rural workers, I still nearly always
started out with my world, without further explanation, as if it ought
to be the “south” to which their compass ought to point in giving
them their bearings. It was as if my word, my theme, my reading
of the world, in themselves, were to be their compass. !®

It was a long learning process, which implied a journey, and not
always an easy one, nearly always painful, to the point that I per-
suaded myself that, even when my thesis and proposal were sure,
and I had no doubt in their respect, it was nevertheless imperative,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 23

first, to know whether this thesis and proposition coincided with
the reading of the world of the groups or social class to whom I was
speaking; second, it was incumbent upon me to be more or less
abreast of, familiar with, their reading of the world, since only on
the basis of the knowledge in its content, or implicit in it, would it
be possible for me to discuss my reading of the world, which in
turn, maintains, and is based on, another type of knowledge.

This learning process, this apprenticeship, whose story is a long
one, is rehearsed in my university dissertation, cited above, contin-
ues being sketched in Educacéo como prdatica da liberdade, and
becomes explicit once and for all in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
One moment—I could even say, a solemn one, among others, of this
apprenticeship—occurred during the one-day seminar to which I
have referred, which consisted of talks in which I discussed author-
ity, freedom, and punishment and reward in education. It happened
precisely in the SESI nucleus or social center named for President
Dutra,!® at Vasco da Gama!’—Amarela House—in Recife.

Basing my presentation on an excellent study by Piaget* on the
child’s moral code, his and her mental representation of punish-
ment, the proportion between the probable cause of punishment
and the punishment itself, I spoke at length. I quoted Piaget himself
on the subject, and argued for a dialogical, loving relationship be-
tween parents and children in place of violent punishments.

My mistake was not in citing Piaget. In fact, how much richer
my presentation could have been if I had talked about him very
concretely, using a map, and showing where Recife is, then the
Brazilian Northeast, then to move out to the whole of Brazil, show
where Brazil is in South America, relate that to the rest of the world,
and finally, point to Switzerland, in Europe, the land of the author
I was quoting. It would have been not only richer, but more chal-
lenging and instructive, to do that. But my actual mistake was, first,
in my use of my language, my syntax, without more effort to get
close to the language and syntax of my audience; and second, in my
all but oblivion of the hard reality of the huge audience seated |
before me. 4

*Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Worden (New
York: Brace World, 1932).

94 + PAULO FREIRE

When I had concluded, a man of about forty, still rather young
but already worn out and exhausted, raised his hand and gave me
the clearest and most bruising lesson I have ever received in my
life as an educator.

I do not know his name. I do not know whether he is still alive.
Possibly not. The wickedness of the country’s socioeconomic struc-
tures, which take on stronger colors in the Brazilian Northeast—
suffering, hunger, the indifference of the mighty—all this must have
swallowed him up long since.

He raised his hand and gave a talk that I have never been able to
forget. It seared my soul for good and all. It has exerted an enormous
influence on me. Nearly always, in academic ceremonies in which
I have had an honorary doctorate conferred on me by some univer-
sity, I acknowledge how much I owe, as well, to persons like the one
of whom I am now speaking, and not only to scholars—other think-
ers who have taught me, too, and who continue to teach me, teachers
without whom it would have been impossible for me to learn, like
the laborer who spoke that night. Actually, were it not for the scien-
tific rigor that offers me greater opportunities for precision in my
findings, I should not be able critically to perceive the importance
of common sense and the good sense therein residing. In almost
every academic ceremony in which I am honored, I see him standing
in one of the aisles of that big auditorium of so long ago, head
erect, eyes blazing, speaking in a loud, clear voice, sure of himself,
speaking his lucid speech.

“We have just heard,” he began, “some nice words from Dr. Paulo
Freire. Fine words, in fact. Well spoken. Some of them were even
simple enough for people to understand easily. Others were more
complicated. But I think I understood the most important things
that all the words together say.

“Now Id like to ask the doctor a couple of things that I find my
fellow workers agree with.”

He fixed me with a mild, but penetrating gaze, and asked: “Dr.
Paulo, sir—do you know where people live? Have you ever been in
any of our houses, sir?” And he began to describe their pitiful
houses. He told me of the lack of facilities, of the extremely minimal
space in which all their bodies were jammed. He spoke of the lack
of resources for the most basic necessities. He spoke of physical

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 25

exhaustion, and of the impossibility of dreams for a better tomorrow.
He told me of the prohibition imposed on them from being happy—
or even of having hope.

As I followed his discourse, I began to see where he was going to
go with it. I was slouching in my chair, slouching because I was
trying to sink down into it. And the chair was swiveling, in the need
of my imagination and the desire of my body, which were both in
flight, to find some hole to hide in. He paused a few seconds, ranging
his eyes over the entire audience, fixed on me once more, and said,
“Doctor, I have never been over to your house. But I’d like to de-
scribe it for you, sir. How many children do you have? Boys or girls?”

“Five,” I said—scrunching further down into my chair. “Three
girls and two boys.”

“Well, Doctor, your house must be the only house on the lot,
what they call an oitdo livre house,” a house with a yard.¥® “There
must be a room just for you and your wife, sir. Another big room,
that's for the three girls. There’s another kind of doctor, who has a
room for every son or daughter. But youre not that kind—no, sir.
You have another room for the two boys. A bathroom with running
water. A kitchen with Arno appliances.!? A maid’s room—much
smaller than your kids rooms—on the outside of the house. A little
garden, with an ‘ingress (the English word) lawn,” a front lawn. “You
must also have a room where you toss your books, sir—a ‘study,’ a
library. I can tell by the way you talk that you've done a lot of
reading, sir, and youve got a good memory.”

There was nothing to add or subtract. That was my house. An-
other world, spacious and comfortable.

“Now Doctor, look at the difference. You come home tired, sir, I
know that. You may even have a headache from the work you do.
Thinking, writing, reading, giving these kind of talks that youre
giving now. That tires a person out too. But, sir,” he continued, “it’s
one thing to come home, even tired, and find the kids all bathed,
dressed up, clean, well fed, not hungry—and another thing to come
home and find your kids dirty, hungry, crying, and making noise.
And people have to get up at four in the morning the next day and
start all over again—hurting, sad, hopeless. If people hit their kids,
and even ‘go beyond bounds,’ as you say, its not because people

26 - PAULO FREIRE

dont love their kids. No, it’s because life is so hard thay dont have
much choice.”

This is class knowledge, I say now.

This talk was given about thirty-two years ago. I have never forgot-
ten it. It said to me, despite the fact that I didnt understand this at
the time, much more than it immediately communicated.

In his intonations, his laborers syntax and rhythm, the move-
ments of his body, his hands of an orator, in the metaphors so com-
mon to popular discourse [he called the attention of the educator
there in front of him, seated, silent, sinking down into his chair, to
the need, when speaking to the people, for the educator to be up
to an understanding of the world the people have. An understanding
of the world which, conditioned by the concrete reality that in part
explains that understanding, can begin to change through a change
in that concrete reality. In fact, that understanding of the world can
begin to change the moment the unmasking of concrete reality be-
gins to lay bare the “whys” of what the actual understanding had
been up until then.

A change in understanding, which is of basic importance, does
not of itself, however, mean a change in the concrete.

The fact that I have never forgotten the fabric in which that dis-
course was delivered is significant. The discourse of that faraway
night is still before me, as if it had been a written text, an essay that
I constantly had to review. Indeed, it was the culmination of the
learning process I had undertaken long ago—that of the progressive
educator: even when one must speak to the people, one must con-
vert the “to” to a “with” the people. And this implies respect for
the “knowledge of living experience” of which I always speak, on
the basis of which it is possible to go beyond it.

That night, in the car on the way back home, I complained to
Elza rather bitterly. Though she rarely accompanied me to meet-
ings, when she did she made excellent observations that always
helped me.

“I thought I'd been so clear,” I said. “I don't think they under-
stood me.’

“Could it have been you, Paulo, who didn’t understand them?”
Elza asked, and she went on: “I think they got the main point of
your talk. The worker made that clear in what he said. They under-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 27

stood you, but they needed to have you understand them. That’s
the question.”

Years later, Pedagogy of the Oppressed spoke of the theory that
became steeped in practice that night, a night whose memory went
with me into exile along with the rememberance of so many other
fabrics lived.

The moments we live either are instants in a process previously
inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a new process referring in some
way to something in the past. This is why I have spoken of the
“kinship” among times lived—something we do not always perceive,
thereby failing to unveil the fundamental why of the way in which
we experience ourselves at each moment.

I should like to refer, now, to another of these times, another
fabric that powerfully scored my existential experience and had a
noticeable influence on the development of my pedagogical thought
and educational practice.

Stepping back, now, from the moment to which I am about to
refer, which I experienced between the ages of twenty-two and
twenty-nine—part of it, then, while I was working in SESI—I see
it as not just a moment but a process, whose point of departure
occurred toward the end of my childhood and the beginning of my
teen years, in Jaboatao.”

During the period I am talking about, from the ages of twenty-
two to twenty-nine, I used to be overcome by a sense of despair and
sadness from time to time. I was a terrible sad sack at these mo-
ments, and I suffered terribly from it. Nearly always, I would spend
two or three days, or even longer, like this. Sometimes this state of
mind would attack me without warning—in the street, in my office,
at home. Sometimes it would come gradually, and get the best of
me piecemeal. Regardless of which way it came, I felt wounded, and
bored with the world, as if I were submerged in myself, in the pain
whose reason I did not know, and everything around me seemed
strange and foreign. Who wouldnt despair?

One time, a schoolmate from high school managed to hurt and
offend me by telling me about something in my behavior of the
previous two or three days that he couldnt understand. “You
wouldnt talk to me! On Empress Street!*! I was heading for Hospice
Street, and you were walking on the other side of the street going

98 - PAULO FREIRE

the other way. I crossed over, and waved a big hello. I thought youd
stop and say hi! And you just kept on walking! Why did you pretend
you didnt see me?”

There were other, less striking, cases than this one. My explana-
tion was always the same. “I didn't see you. Look, I’m your friend!
I wouldnt do something like that!”

Elza always had deep understanding for me when this happened,
and she helped me in every way she could. And the finest help she
could give me, and she gave it, was not to so much as suggest to me
that my attitude toward her was changing.

After I had had these experiences for some time, especially as
they were beginning to happen more and more often, I began to
try to see it in the framework, in which it occurred, see it as a
part of the bigger picture. What were the elements, or surrounding
elements, of the actual moment at which I felt that way?

When I could see the depression coming, I tried to see what it
was that was there around me. I tried to see again, tried to remem-
ber, what had happened the day before, tried to hear once more
what had been said and to whom it had been said, what I had heard
and from whom I had heard it. When you come right down to it, I
began to take my depression as an object of curiosity and investiga-
tion. I “stepped back” from it, to learn its “why.” Basically, I needed
to shed some light on the framework in which it was being
generated.

I began to perceive that it was repeated, almost identically—my
depression, this lack of interest in the world, this pessimism: that it
occurred more often in the rainy season, and mostly at or around
the time of the trips I would make to the Zona da Mata to speak in
SESI schools to teachers and pupils families on educational prob-
lems. This observation called my attention to the trips I made with
the same objective to the farming zone of the state. But it didnt
happen in connection with these trips. So it wasn't trips that were
the cause of my depression.

I find it interesting that I can condense into just a few pages the
three or four years of search out of the seven during which that
moment was repeated.

My first visit to the city of Sdo Paulo occurred when my search
happened to be in full swing.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 99

The day after I arrived, I was in my hotel, that afternoon, and
the rain began to pour. I went over to the window to peer out at
the world outside. The sky was black, and it was really coming down.
But one thing was lacking, in the world that I was observing, by
comparison with the pouring rain that would be accompanied with
such deep depression. What was missing was green, and mud—the
black earth soaking up the water, or the yellow clay turning into the
slippery, or else slurpy-sticky, mass that “grabs you like a great, big
constrictor, as Gilberto Freyre said of massapé, the black clay of
the Northeast.”

The dark sky of Sao Paulo that day, and the falling rain, had no
effect on me whatsoever.

On my return to Recife, I brought with me a mental portrait that
the visit to Sao Paulo had helped me to put together. My depres-
sions were doubtless connected to rain, and mud—massapé clay—
and the green of the cane brakes and the dark sky. Not connected
to any of these elements in isolation, but to the relationship among
them. What I needed now, in order to gain a clear understanding
of the experience of my suffering, was to discover the remote frame-
work in which these elements had won or had been winning the
power to spark my depression. At bottom, in seeking for the deepest
“why” of my pain, I was educating my hope. I never expected things
just to “be that way.” I worked on things, on facts, on my will. I
invented the concrete hope in which, one day, I would see myself
delivered from my depression.

And so it was that, one rainy afternoon in Recife, under a leaden
sky, I went to Jaboatéo in quest of my childhood. If it was raining
in Recife, in Jaboatéo, which was known as the “spout of heaven,”
there was no describing it. And it was under a heavy rain that I
paid my visit to Morro da Satide, where I had lived as a child. I
stopped in front of the house in which I had lived—the house in
which my father died in the late afternoon of October 21, 1934. I
saw again the long lawn that stretched before the house at the time,
the lawn we played soccer on. I saw again the mango trees, their
green fronds. I saw my feet again, my muddy feet going up the hill,
and me soaked to the skin. I had before me, as on a canvas, my
father dying, my mother in stupefaction, my family lost in sorrow.

Then I walked down the hill and went to see once more certain

30 - PAULO FREIRE

areas where, more out of need than for sport, | had hunted innocent
little birds, with the slingshot I had made myself and with which I
became an excellent shot.”

That rainy afternoon, with the sky dark as lead over the bright
green land, the ground soaked, I discovered the fabric of my depres-
sion. I became conscious of various relationships between the signs
and the central core, the deeper core, hidden within me. I unveiled
the problem by clearly and lucidly grasping its “why.” I dug up the
archeology of my pain.”

Since then, never again has the relationship between rain, green,
and mud or sticky clay sparked in me the depression that had af-
flicted me for years. I buried it, that rainy afternoon I revisited
Jaboataéo. At the same time as I was struggling with my personal
problem, I devoted myself to SESI groups of rural and urban work-
ers, worked on the problem of moving from my discourse about my
reading of the world to them, and moving them, challenging them,
to speak of their own reading.

Many of them had possibly experienced the same process I had
lived through—that of unraveling the fabric in which the facts are
given, discovering their “why.”

[ Many, perhaps, had suffered, and not just a little, in redoing their
reading of the world under the impulse of a new perception—in
which it was not actually destin , or fate or an inescapable lot that
explained their helplessness as 8? their impotence in the face
of the defeated, squalid body ‘of th their companion, and their death
for want of resources.

Let me make it clear, then, that, in the domain of socioeconomic
structures, the most critical knowledge of reality, which we acquire
through the unveiling of that reality, does not of itself alone effect a
_change in reality.

In my case, as I have just recounted, the unmasking of the “why”
of my experience of suffering was all that was needed to overcome
it. True, I was freed from a limitation that actually threatened both
my professional activity and my life in the community of my fellow
human beings. It had come to the point that I was politically limited,
as well.

JA more critical understanding of the situation of oppression does
not yet liberate the oppressed. But the revelation is a step in the

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 31

right direction. |Now the person who has this new understanding can
engage in a political struggle for the transformation of the concrete
conditions in which the oppression prevails. Here is what I mean.
In my case, it was enough to know the fabric in which my suffering
had been born in order to bury it. In the area of socioeconomic
structures, a critical perception of the fabric, while indispensable,
is not sufficient to change the data of the problem, any more than
it is enough for the worker to have in mind the idea of the object
to be produced: that object has to be made.

But the hope of producing the object is as basic to the worker as
the hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of
oppressed men and ie revelatory, gnosiological practice
of education does not of itself effect the transformation of the world:
but it implies it. /

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile—not even
those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse,
children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without
having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We
carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our
history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes
sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence;
the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out be-
fore us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time
of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now
forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted
and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being
rejected—which, as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also |
means refusal of risk. 7

We experience, of course, in the voyage we make, a tumult in our
soul, a synthesis of contrasting feelings—the hope of immediate
deliverance from the perils that surround us, relief at the absence
of the inquisitor (either the brutal, offensive interrogator, or the
tactically polite prosecutor to whose lips this “evil, dangerous sub-
versive” will yield, it is thought, more easily), along with, for the
extension of the tumult of and in the soul, a guilt-feeling at leaving
one’s world, one’s soil, the scent of one’s soil,” one’s folks. To the
tumult in the soul belongs also the pain of the broken dream, utopia
lost. The danger of losing hope. I have known exiles who began to

32 - PAULO FREIRE

buy a piece of furniture or two for their homes only after four or
five years in exile. Their half-empty homes seemed to speak, elo-
quently, of their loyalty to a distant land. In fact, their hali-empty
rooms not only seemed to wish to speak to them of their longing to
return, but looked as if the movers had just paid a visit and they
_were actually moving back. The half-empty house lessened the senti-
ment of blame at having left the “old sod.” In this, perhaps, lies a
certain need that I have so often perceived in persons exiled: the
need to feel persecuted, to be constantly trailed by some secret
agent who dogged their step and whom they alone ever saw. To
know they were so dangerous gave them, on the one hand, the
sensation of still being politically alive; and on the other, the sensa-
tion of a right to survive, through cautious measures. It diminished
their guilt feelings.
~ Indeed, one of the serious problems of the man or woman in exile
is how to wrestle, tooth and nail, with feelings, desire, reason, recall,
accumulated knowledge, worldviews, with the tension between a
today being lived in a reality on loan and a yesterday, in their context
of origin, whose fundamental marks they come here charged with.
At ibe problem is how to preserve one’s identity in the
relationship between an indispensable occupation in the new con-
text, and a preoccupation in which the original context has to be
reconstituted./ How to wrestle with the yearning without allowing it
to turn into nostalgia, How to invent new ways of living, and living
with others, thereby overcoming or redirecting an understandable
tendency on the part of the exiled woman or man always to regard
the context of origin (as it cannot be got rid of as a reference, at least
not over the long haul) as better than the one on loan. Sometimes it
is actually better; not always, however.
~ Basically, it is very difficult to experience exile, to live with all
the different longings—for one’s town or city, one’s country, family,
relatives, a certain corner, certain meals—to live with longing, and
“educate it too. The education of longing has to do with the transcen-
dence of a naively excessive optimism, of the kind, for example, with
which certain companions received me in October 1964 in La Paz:
“Youre just in time to turn around. We'll be home for Christmas.”
I had arrived there after a month or a little more than a month
in the Bolivian embassy in Brazil, waiting for the Brazilian govern-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 33

ment to deign to send me the safe-conduct pass without which I
should not be allowed to leave. Shortly before, I had been arrested,
and subjected to long interrogations by military personnel who
seemed to think that, in asking these questions of theirs, they were
saving not only Brazil but the whole world.

“We'll be home for Christmas.”

“Which Christmas?” I asked, with curiosity, and even more sur-
prise.

“This Christmas!” they answered, with unshakable certitude.

My first night in La Paz, not yet under the onslaughts of of the
altitude sickness that were to fall upon me the next day, I reflected
a bit on the education of longing, which figures in Pedagogy of
Hope.jIt would be terrible, I thought, to let the desire to return
kill in us the critical view,]and make us look at everything that
happens back home in a favorable way—create in our head a reality
that isnt real.

Exile is a difficult experience. Waiting for the letter that never
comes because it has been lost, waiting for notice of a final decision
that never arrives. Expecting sometimes that certain people will
come, even going to the airport simply to “expect,” as if the verb
were intransitive.

It is far more difficult to experience exile when we make no effort
to adopt its space-time critically—accept it as an opportunity with
which we have been presented. [It is this critical ability to plunge
into a new daily reality, without preconceptions, that brings the man
or woman in exile to a more historical understanding of his or her
own situation “It is one thing, then, to experience the everyday in
the context of one’s origin, immersed in the habitual fabrics from
which we can easily emerge to make our investigations, and some-
thing else again to experience the everyday in the loan context that
calls on us not only to become able to grow attached to this new
context, but also to take it as an object of our critical reflection, much

age

more than we do our own from a point of departure in our own. |

I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 1964, and another coup
d'état took me by surprise. In November of the same year I landed
in Arica, in Chile, where I startled my fellow passengers, as we
were making our descent toward the airport, by calling out, loud
and strong, “Long live oxygen!” I had left an altitude of four thou-

34 + PAULO FREIRE

sand meters and was returning to sea level. My body once more
became as viable as it had been before. I moved with facility, rapidly,
without exhaustion. In La Paz, carrying a package, even a little one,
meant an extraordinary effort for me. At forty-three I felt old and
decrepit. In Arica, and on the next day in Santiago, I got my strength
back, and everything happened almost instantly, as if by sleight of
hand. Long live oxygen!

I arrived in Chile with my whole self: passion, longing, sadness,
hope, desire, dreams in smithereens but not abandoned, offenses,
knowledge stored in the countless fabrics of living experience, avail-
ability for life, fears and terrors, doubts, a will to live and love.
Hope, especially.

I arrived in Chile, and a few days later started to work as a consul-
tant for renowned economist Jacques Chonchol, president of the
Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario (Institute for the Development
of Animal Husbandry)—the INDAP—subsequently to be minister
of agriculture in the Allende government.

Only in mid-January of 1965 were we all back together. Elza, the
three girls, and the two boys, with all their terrors, their doubts,
their hopes, their fears, their knowledge gotten and being gotten,
started a new life with me again in a strange land—a foreign land
to which we were giving ourselves in such wise that it was receiving
us in a way that the foreignness was turning into comradeship,
friendship, siblingship. Homesick as we were for Brazil, we had a
sudden special place in our hearts for Chile, which taught us Latin
America in a way we had never imagined it.

I reached Chile a few days after the inauguration of Eduardo
Freys Christian Democratic government. There was a climate of
euphoria in the streets of Santiago. It was as if a profound, radical,
substantial transformation of society had occurred. Only the forces
of the Right, at one extreme, and those of the Marxist-Leninist Left
at the other, for different reasons, obviously, did not share the eu-
phoria. How vast it was! What a certitude there was, rooted in the
minds of Christian Democracy activists, that their revolution was
fixed on solid ground, that no threat could even get near it! One of
their favorite arguments, more metaphysical than historical, was
what they called the “democratic and constitutionalist tradition of
the Chilean armed forces.”

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 35

“Never will there be an uprising against the established order,”
they said, sure as sure can be, in conversations with us.

I remember a meeting that did not go very well at the home of one
of these militants, with some thirty of them, in which Plinio Sampaio,
Paulo de Tarso Santos,?”)Almino Affonso, and I, participated.

We argued that the so-called tradition of loyalty on the part of
the armed forces to the established, democratic order was not an
immutable quality, an intrinsic property of the military, but a mere
“historical given, and therefore that this “tradition” might become
historically shattered and a new process take its place. They an-
swered that Brazilians in exile gave them “the impression of being
crybabies who ve had their toys taken away,” or “frustrated, helpless
children.” There was no conversing with them.

A few years later the Chilean armed forces decided to change
positions. I hope it was without the contribution of any of those with
whom we were conversing that night, as I hope as well that none of
them had to pay as dearly as thousands of other Chileans did—along
with other Latin Americans—under the weight of the perversity
and cruelty that came crashing down on Chile in September 1973.
It was not by chance, then, that the most backward of the elite, in
whom even timid liberal positions stirred threat and fear, frightened
at the reformist policy of Christian Democracy, which was then re-
garded as a kind of middle road, dreamed of the need to put an end
to all this bold, too-risky business. Just imagine what Allende’s vic-
tory meant, then, not only for the Chilean elite, but for the outsiders
of the North!

I visited Chile twice during the time of the Popular Unity govern-
ment, and used to say, in Europe and in the United States, that
anyone who wanted to get a concrete idea of the class struggle, as
expressed in the most divergent ways, really ought to pay a visit to
Chile. Especially, if you wanted to see—practically touch with your
hands—the tactics the dominant classes employed in the struggle,
and the richness of their imagination when it came to waging a more
effective struggle for the resolution of the contradiction between
power and government, I would tell my audiences, you really must
go to Chile. What had happened is that power, as a fabric of rela-
tions, decisions, and force, continued to be the main thing with
them, while the government, which was in charge of policy, found

36 - PAULO FREIRE

itself being propelled by progressive forces, forces in discord with
the others. This opposition, this contradiction, had to be overcome,
so that both power and government would be in their hands again.
The coup was the solution. And so, even within the Christian Demo-
cratic party, the Right tended to place obstacles in the way of the
democratic policy of the more advanced echelons, especially of the
youth. As the process developed, a clearer and clearer tendency to
radicalization, and breach between the discordant options, ap-
peared, precluding a peaceful coexistence between them, either in
the party or in society itself.

On the outside, the Marxist-Leninist Left, the Communist party
and the Socialist party, had their ideological, political, historical,
and cultural reasons for not joining in the euphoria. They regarded
it as naive at best.

In step with the waxing and deepening of the class struggle or
conflicts, the rift between the forces of Right and Left, among Chris-
tian Democrats as in civil society, likewise deepened. Thus arose
various tendencies on the Left calculated to regiment militants who,
in direct contact with the popular bases, or seeking to understand
these grassroots elements through a reading of the classic Marxists,
began to call on the carpet the reformism that had finally gained
the upper hand in the strategic plans of Christian Democratic policy.

The Movimiento Independente Revolucionério, the MIR, was
born in Concepcion, and was constituted of revolutionary youth who
disagreed with what seemed to them to be a deviation on the part
of the Communist party—that of a “coexistence” with elements of
“bourgeois democracy.”

It is interesting, however, that the MIR, which was constantly to
the Left of the Communist party, and afterwards, of the Popular
Unity government itself, always manifested a sympathy for popular
education, something the parties of the traditional Left generally
lacked.

When the Communist party and the Socialist party refused, dog-
matically, to work with certain poblaciénes who, they said, were
without a “class consciousness,” so that they mobilized only for ad
hoc protests and automatically demobilized whenever their de-
mands were met, the MIR thought it necessary, first, to prove the
correctness of this attitude toward the Lumpenproletariat, the “great

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 37

unwashed,” and second, to observe whether, admitting the hypothe-
sis that their proposition had been verified in certain situations, it
would be verified again in a different historical moment. In other
words, while there was some truth in the proposition, it could not
be taken as a metaphysical postulate.

And so it came about that, now under the Popular Unity govern-
ment, the MIR launched an intensive campaign of mobilization and
organization—itself a piece of political pedagogy—in which it in-
cluded a series of educational projects in the popular areas. In 1973,
I had the opportunity to spend an evening with the leaders of the
poblacién—settlement or “new city’ —of ‘Nueba Habana, which,
contrary to the dour forecast, after obtaining what it had been de-
manding, its own villa, continued active and creative, maintaining
countless projects in the area of education, health, justice, social
security, and sports. I paid a visit to a lineup of old buses, donated by |
the government, whose bodies, converted and adapted, had become
neat, nicely set up little schoolrooms, which the children of the
poblacién attended. In the evenings, the bus-schoolrooms would fill
with literacy-program clients, who were learning to read the word
through a reading of the world.|; Nueba Habana had a future, then,
if an uncertain one, and the climate surrounding it and.the experi-
mental pedagogy being plied within it was one of hope.)

Alongside the MIR arose the Movimiento de Acci6n Popular Uni-
taria, and the Christian Left, further splintering the Christian
Democrats. A sizable contingent of more advanced youth among the
Christian Democrats joined the MAPU, or else the Christian Left,
and even migrated to the MIR as well, or the Communist and Social-
ist parties.

Today, nearly thirty years later, one readily perceives what, at the
time, only a few grasped, and already urged. They were sometimes
regarded as dreamers, utopians, idealists, or even as “selling out to
the gringos.” At this distance, it is easy to see that only a radical
politics—not a sectarian one, however, but one that seeks a unity in
diversity among progressive forces—could ever have won the battle
for a democracy that could stand up to the power and virulence of
the Right. Instead, there was only sectarianism and intolerance—
the rejection of differences. (Tolerance was not what it ought to be:
the revolutionary virtue that consists in a peaceful coexistence with

38 - PAULO FREIRE

those who are different, in order to wage a better fight against the
adversaries.

The correct road for the progressive forces standing to the Left
of the Christian Democrats would have been to move—within ethi-
cal limits of concession on policy—closer and closer to them, not in
order to take over the party, nor again in such a manner as to drive
it to the Right, nor, indeed, so as to be absorbed into it. And for its
own part, Christian Democracy, in all intolerance, rejected dialogue.
There was no credibility on either side.

It was precisely by virtue of the inability of all forces to tolerate

» one another that Popular Unity came to power. . . without power.
« {From November 1964°to April 1969, I followed the ideological
struggle closely! I witnessed, sometimes with surprise, retreats in
the area of political ideology by persons who had proclaimed their
option for the transformation of society, then became frightened and
repentant, and made a fearful about-face in midcourse and turned
into hidebound reactionaries. But I also saw the advances made by
those who confirmed their progressive discourse by walking consis-
tently, refusing to run from history. I likewise witnessed the progress
of persons whose initial position had been timid, to say the least,
but who became stronger, ultimately to assert themselves in a radi-
calness that never extended to sectarianism.
would really have been impossible to experience a process this
rich,! this problem-fraught, to have been touched so profoundly by
the climate of accelerated change, to have shared in such animated,
lively discussion in the “culture circles” in which educators often
had to beg the peasants to stop, since they had already gone on
practically the whole night, Without all of this later winning explica-
tion in this or that theoretical position of mine in the book that, at
the time, was not even a =rojeae”
was impressed, when I heard about it in evaluation meetings,
or when I was actually present, by the intensity of the peasants
involvement when they were analyzing their local and national real-
ity. It took them mae seemed like forever to spill everything that
was on their minds\\It was as if the “culture of silence” was suddenly
shattered, and they had ‘discovered not only that they could speak,
but that their critical discourse upon the world, their world, was a
way of remaking that world. It was if they had begun to perceive that

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 39

the development of their language, which occurred in the course of |
their analysis of their reality, finally showed them that the lovlier /
world to which they aspired was being announced, somehow antici-
pated, in their imagination) It was not a matter of idealism) Imagina-
tion and conjecture about a different world than the one of
oppression, are as necessary to the praxis of historical “subjects” a @
(agents) in the process of transforming reality as it necessarily be-« Yh
longs to human toil that the worker or artisan first have in his or pi
her head a design, a “conjecture,” of what he or she is about to ~~”!
ees ‘Here is one of the tasks of democratic popular education, of
edagogy of hope: that of enabling the popular c ae to develop
ei language: not the authoritarian, sectarian gobbledygook of
“educators, but their own language—which, emerging from and
returning upon their reality, sketches out the conjectures, the de-
signs, the anticipations of their new world. Here is one of the central
questions of popular education—that of nUae as a route to the
invention of citizenship.) Cena amiaiya ery
As Jacques Chonchol’s consultant in the fittiais for the Develop-
ment of Animal Husbandry, in the area of what was then called in
Chile human promotion, I was able to extend my collaboration to
the Ministry of Education, in cooperation with people working in
adult literacy, as well as to the Corporation for Agrarian Reform.
Quite a bit later, almost two years before we left Chile, I began
to work as a consultant for these same organizations on the basis of
my position in another, the Instituto de Capacitaci6n e Investigacién
en Reforma Agraria (Institute for Ways and Means and Research in
Agrarian Reform, or ICIRA), a joint organization of the United Na-
tions and the Chilean government. I worked there for UNESCO,
against the will and under the consistent niggardly protest of the
Brazilian military government of the period. |
And it was as consultant for the Institute for the Development
of Animal Husbandry, for the Ministry of Education, and for the
Corporation for Agrarian Reform, that, as I traveled practically all
over the country, always in the company of young Chileans, who
were mostly progressives, I Jistened to peasants and discussed with
them various aspects of their concrete reality. |I urged upon agrono-
mists and agricultural technologists a political, pedagogical, demo-
cratic understanding of their practice. I debated general problems

40 - PAULO FREIRE

of educational policy with the educators of the cities and towns
I visited.

I still have in my memory today, as fresh as ever, snatches of
discourses by peasants and expressions of their/legitimate desires
for the betterment of their world, for a finer, less-ugly world, a world
whose “edges” would be less “rough,” in which it would be possible
to love—Guevaras dream, too.

I shall never forget what a UN sociologist, an excellent intellectual
and no less excellent a person, a Dutchman who wore a red beard,
told me after we had assisted, all enthusiastic and full of confidence
in the working class, at a two hour discussion on their eagerness for
the establishment of agrarian reform by the government (still the
Christian Democrats) in a remote corner of Chile. The peasants had
been discussing their right to the land, their right to the freedom
to produce, to raise crops and livestock, to live decently, to be. They
had defended their right to be respected as persons and as workers
who were creators of wealth, and they had demanded their right of
access to culture and knowledge. It is in this direction that those
historico-social conditions intersected in which the pedagogy of the
oppressed could take root—and this time I am not referring to the
book I wrote—which, in turn, is here being matched by, or pro-
longed into, a needed pedagogy of hope.

With the meeting over, as we were leaving the wagon shed where
it had been held, my Dutch friend with the red beard put his
hand on my shoulder and said—choosing his phrases carefully, and
speaking with conviction: “It's been worth four days of wandering
through these corners of Chile, to hear what we heard tonight.”
And he added, good-humoredly, “These peasants know more than
we do.”

I think it is important, at this point, to call attention to something
I have emphasized in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: the relationship
prevailing between political lucidity in a reading of the world, and
the various levels of engagement in the process of mobilization and
organization for the struggle—for the defense of rights, for laying
claim to justice.

i Progressive educators have to be on the alert where this datum
'| is concerned, in their work of popular education, since not only
the content, but the various manners in which one approaches the

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 4l

content, stand in direct relation with the levels of struggle referred
to above. 4
[it is one thing to work with popular groups, and experience the ©
way in which those peasants operated that night, and something else
again to work with popular groups who have not yet managed to
“see the oppressor “outside.” }

This datum continues valid today. (Th he neoliberal discourses,
chock-full of, “modernity,” do not have sufficient force to do away
with social classes and decree the nonexistence of differing interests
among them, any more than they have the strength to make away.

with the. conflicts “and struggle between them. }

Tit happens that struggle is a historical and sovial category. There-
fore it has eet It changes from one space-time to another
space-time The fact of the struggle does: not militate against the
possibility Of pacts, agreements between the antagonistic parties. In
other words, agreements and accords are part of the struggle, as a
historical, and not metaphysical, category.

There are historical moments in which the survival of the ode
whole, which is in the interest of all the social classes, imposes upon
those classes the necessity of understanding one another—which
does not mean that we are experiencing a new age devoid of social
classes and of conflicts.)

The four-and-one-half years that I lived in Chile, then, were years
of a profound learning process. It was the first time, with the excep-
tion of a brief visit to Bolivia, that I had had the experience of
distancing myself geographically, with its epistemological conse-
quences, from Brazil. Hence the importance of those four-and-one-
half years.

Sometimes, on long automobile trips, with stops in cities along
the way—Santiago to Puerto Mont, Santiago to Arica—I gave myself
over to the quest for myself, refreshing my memory when it came
to Brazil, about what I had done here, with other persons, mistakes
made, the verbal incontinence that few intellectuals of the Left had
escaped and to which many today still devote themselves, and
through which they reveal a terrible ignorance of the role of lan-
guage in history.

“Agrarian reform, like it or lump it!” “Either this congress votes
laws in the people’s interests or well close it.”

42 .- PAULO FREIRE

Actually, all of this verbal incontinence, this explosion of verbiage
has no connection, none whatever, with a correct, authentic progres-
sive position. It has no connection with a correct understanding of
struggle as political, historical practice. It is quite true, as well, that
all of this volubility, precisely because it is not done in a vacuum,
ends by generating consequences that retard needed changes even
more. At times, however, the irresponsible chatter also generates a
discovery of the fact that/verbal restraint is an indispensable virtue
for those who devote themselves to the dream of a better world—a
world in which women and men meet in a process of ongoing
liberation,

Basically, I sought to reunderstand the fabrics, the facts, the deeds
in which I had been wrapped and enveloped. Chilean reality, in its
difference from our own, helped me to a better understanding of
my experiences, and the latter, reseen, helped me to understand

what was happening and could be happening in Chile.

- J traversed a great part of that country on trips on which I really
learned a great deal. Side by side with Chilean educators, I learned
by helping administer training courses for persons proposing to work
at the grass roots in agrarian reform projects, those who would work
with the peasants on the fundamental problem of the reading of the
word, always preceded by a reading of the world. The reading and
writing of the word would always imply a more critical rereading of
the world as a “route” to the “rewriting —the transformation—of
that world. Hence the hope that necessarily steeps Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. Hence also the need, in literacy projects conducted in
a progressive perspective, for a comprehension of language, and of
its role, to which we have referred, in the achievement of citizenship.

It was by attempting to inculcate a maximal respect for the cul-
tural differences with which I had to struggle, one of them being
language—in which I made an effort to express myself, as best I
could, with clarity—that I learned so much of reality, and learned
it with Chileans.

Respect for cultural differences, respect for the context to which
one has come, a criticism of “cultural invasion,” of sectarianism,
and a defense of radicalness, of which I speak in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed—all of this was something that, having begun to be part

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 48

of my experience years before in Brazil, whose knowledge I had
brought with me into exile, in the memory contained within my
own self, was intensely, rigorously experienced by me in my years
in Chile.

These elements of knowledge, which had been critically consti-
tuted in me since the inauguration of SESI, were consolidated in
Chilean practice, and in the theoretical reflection I made upon that
practice—in enlightening readings that made me laugh for joy, al-
most like a teenager, at finding in them a theoretical explanation of
my practice, or the confirmation of the theoretical understanding
that I had had of my practice. Santiago, to mention just the team of
Brazilians living there, sometimes de jure—in exile—sometimes
just de facto, unquestionably provided us with a rich opportunity.
Christian Democracy, which spoke of itself as a “revolution in free-
dom,” attracted countless intellectuals, student and union leaders,
and groups of leftist political leaders from all over Latin America.
Santiago, especially, had become a place, or grand context of theory-
of-practice, in which those who arrived from other corners of Latin
America would discuss, with Chileans and foreigners living there,
both what was going on in Chile and what was going on in their
own countries.

Latin America was effervescent in Santiago. Cubans were there,
threatened as much as ever by the reactionary forces that, all filled
with themselves, spoke of the death of socialism. The Cubans
showed that changes could be made. There were the guerrilla theo-
ries, the “focus theory,” the extraordinary charismatic personality of
Camilo Torres—in whom no dichotomy existed between transcen-
dentality and worldliness, history and metahistory—liberation the-
ology was there (so soon to provoke fear, trembling, and rage),
Guevara's capacity for love was there, as in the line he wrote to
Carlos Guijano, as sincere as it was arresting: “Let me tell you, at
the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the genuine revolutionary is
animated by feelings of love. It is impossible to imagine an authentic
revolutionary without this quality."* ;

In May 1968 came the student movements in the outside world,

*Ernesto Guevara, Obra revoluciondria (Mexico City: Era, 1967).

44 +. PAULO FREIRE

rebellious, libertarian. There was Marcuse, with his influence on
youth. In China, Mao Tse-tung and the cultural revolution.

~ Santiago had become almost a kind of “bedroom community”
for intellectuals, for politicians of the most varied persuasions. In
this sense, perhaps Santiago was, in itself, at that time, the best
center of “learning” and knowledge in Latin America. We learned
of analyses, reactions, and criticisms by Colombians, Venezuelans,
Cubans, Mexicans, Bolivians, Argentinians, Paraguayans, Brazilians,
Chileans, and Europeans—analyses ranging from an almost unre-
stricted acceptance of Christian Democracy to its total rejection.
There were sectarian, intolerant criticisms, but also open, radical
criticisms in the sense that I advocate.

Some of my companions in exile and I learned not only from
encounters with many of the Latin Americans I have mentioned who
passed through Santiago, but from the excitement of a “knowledge of
living experience,” from the dreams, from the clarity, from the
doubts, from the ingenuousness, from the “cunning” of the Chilean
workers—more rural than urban, in my case.

I remember now a visit I made, with a Chilean companion, to an
agrarian reform project some hours distance from Santiago. A num-
ber of evening “culture circles” were in operation there, and we had
come to follow the process of the reading of the word and rereading
of the world. In the second or third circle we visited, I felt a strong
desire to try a dialogue with a group of peasants. Generally I avoided
this because of the language difficulty. I was afraid my language
gaffes might prejudice the smooth functioning of the work. That
evening I decided to lay this concern aside, and, asking permission
from the educator coordinating the discussion, I asked the group
whether they were willing to have a conversation with me.

They accepted, and we began a lively dialogue, with questions
and replies on both sides—promptly followed, however, by a discon-
certing silence.

I too remained silent. In the silence, I remembered earlier experi-
ences, in the Brazilian Northeast, and I guessed what was going to
happen. I knew and expected that, suddenly, one of them, breaking
the silence, would speak in his or her name and that of his or her
companions. I even knew the tenor of that discourse. And so my

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 45

own waiting, in the silence, must have been less painful than it was
for them to listen to the silence.

“Excuse us, sir,” said one of them, “.. . excuse us for talking.
Youre the one who should have been talking, sir. You know things,
sir. We dont.”

How many times I have heard this statement in Pernambuco, and
not only in the rural zones, but even in Recife. And it was at the
price of having to hear statements like that that I learned that{ for
the progressive educator, there is no other route than to seize the
educands “moment” and begin with their “here” and “now’—but
as a stepping-stone to getting beyond, critically, their naiveté./It will .
do no harm to repeat that a respect for the peasants’ ingenuousness,
without ironical smiles or malicious questions, does not mean that
the educator must accommodate to their level of reading of the
world.

What would have been meaningless would have been for me to
“fill” the silence of the group of peasants with my words, thus rein-
forcing the ideology that they had just enunciated. What I had to
do was to/begin with the acceptance of something said in the dis-
course of thé peasant and make a problem of it for them, and thereby |
bring them once more to dialogue. |

On the other hand, it would have been likewise meaningless—
after having heard what the peasant said, begging pardon on behalf
of the group for having spoken, when I was the one who knew how
to do that, because I “knew —if I had given them a lecture, with
doctoral airs, on the “ideology of power and the power of ideology.”

Purely parenthetically, I cannot resist—at a moment like this, as
I relive Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and speak of cases like this
one that I have experienced, the experience of which has given me
theoretical foundations for not only advocating, but experiencing
respect for the popular groups in my work as an educator—I cannot
resist expressing my regret over a certain type of criticism in which
I am pointed to as an “elitist.” Or, at the opposite pole, where I am
sketched as a “populist.”

[T he far-off years of my experiences in SESI, the years of my
intense learning process with fishers, with peasants and urban labor-
ers, among the hillocks and ravines,of Recife, had vaccinated me, as
it were, against an elitist arrogance. My experience has taught me

6 PaO FREIRE
that educands need to be addressed as such; but to address them
as educands implies a recognition of oneself, the educator, as one
of two agents here, each capable of knowing and each wishing to
know, and each working with the other for an understanding of the
object of cognition. Thus, teaching and learning are moments in a
larger process—that of knowing, of cognizing, which implies re-
cognizing. At bottom, what I mean is that the educand really be-
comes an educand when and to the extent that he or she knows, or
comes to know, content, cognoscible objects, and not in the measure
that the educator is depositing in the educand a description of the
objects or content.

Educands recognize themselves as such by cognizing objects—
discovering that they are capable of knowing, as they assist at the
immersion of significates, in which process they also become critical
“significators.” Rather than being educands because of some reason
or other, educands need to become educands by assuming them-
selves, taking themselves as cognizing subjects, and not as an object
upon which the discourse of the educator impinges. Herein lies, in
the last analysis, the great political importance of the teaching act.
It is this, among other elements, that distinguishes a progressive
educator from his or her reactionary colleague.

“All right,” I said, in response to the peasant's intervention. “Let's
say I know and you dont. Still, I'd like to try a game with you that,
to work right, will require our full effort and attention. I'm going
to draw a line down the middle of this chalkboard, and I’m going to
write down on this side the goals I score against you, and on this
other side the ones you score against me. The game will consist in
asking each other questions. If the person asked doesn't know the
answer, the person who asked the question scores a goal. I'll start
the game by asking you a question.”

At this point, precisely because I had seized the group’s “mo-
ment, the climate was more lively than when we had begun, before
the silence.

First question:

“What is the Socratic maieutic?”

General guffawing. Score one for me.

“Now it's your turn to ask me a question,” I said.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE « 47

There was some whispering, and one of them tossed out the
question:

“What's a contour curve?”

I couldnt answer. I marked down one to one.

“What importance does Hegel have in Marx’s thought?”

Two to one.

“Whats soil liming?”

Two to two.

“What's an intransitive verb?”

Three to two.

“Whats a contour curve got to do with erosion?”

Three to three.

“What's epistemology?”

Four to three.

“What's green fertilizer?”

Four to four.

And so on, until we got to ten to ten.

As I said good-bye, I made a suggestion. “Let's think about this
evening. You had begun to have a fine discussion with me. Then
you were silent, and said that only I could talk because I was the
only one who knew anything. Then we played a knowledge game
and we tied ten to ten. I knew ten things you didn't, and you knew
ten things I didnt. Let's think about this.”

On the way back home I recalled the first experience I had had,
long before, in the Zona da Mata of Pernambuco, like the one I had
just had here.

After a few moments of good discussion with a group of peasants,
silence fell on us and enveloped us all. What one of them had said
then, in Portuguese, was the same thing as I had heard tonight in
Spanish—a literal translation of what the Chilean peasant had said
this evening.

“Fine,” I had told them. fi know. You dont. But why do I know
and you don’t?” |

Accepting his statement, I prepared the ground for my interven-
tion. A vivacious sparkle in them all. Suddenly curiosity was kindled.
The answer was not long in coming.

“You know because youre a doctor, sir, and were not.”

48 +. PAULO FREIRE

“Right, I’m a doctor and youre not. But why am I a doctor and
youre not?”

“Because youve gone to school, you've read things, studied things,
and we havent.”

“And why have I been to school?”

“Because your dad could send you to school. Ours couldnt.”

“And why couldnt your parents send you to school?”

“Because they were peasants like us.”

“And what is ‘being a peasant?”

“It’s not having an education . . . not owning anything. . . work-
ing from sun to sun. . . having no rights . . . having no hope.”

“And why doesn't a peasant have any of this?”

“The will of God.”

“And who is God?”

“The Father of us all.”

“And who is a father here this evening?”

Almost all raised their hands, and said they were.

I looked around the group without saying anything. Then I picked
out one of them and asked him, “How many children do you have?”

“Three.”

“Would you be willing to sacrifice two of them, and make them
suffer so that the other one could go to school, and have a good life,
in Recife? Could you love your children that way?”

“No!”

“Well, if you,” I said, “a person of flesh and bones, could not
commit an injustice like that—how could God commit it? Could
God really be the cause of these things?”

A different kind of silence. Completely different from the first. A
silence in which something began to be shared. Then:

“No. God isn't the cause of all this. It’s the boss!”

Perhaps for the first time, those peasants were making an effort
to get beyond the relationship that I called, in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, that of the “adherence” of the oppressed to the oppres-
sor, in order to “step back” from the oppressor, and localize the
oppressor “outside” themselves, as Fanon would say.

From that point of departure, we could have gotten to an under-
standing of the role of the “boss,” in the context of a certain socioeco-
nomic, political system—gotten to an understanding of the social

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 49

relations of production, gotten to an understanding of class interests,
and so on and so on.

What would have been completely senseless would have been if,
after the silence that had so brusquely interrupted our dialogue, I
had given a traditional speech, crammed with empty, intolerant
slogans.

CHAPTER

oday, at more than twenty-five years distance from those

mornings, those evenings, those nights of seeing, hearing,

all but touching with my hands sectarian certitudes that
precluded other certitudes, that denied doubts, that asserted a truth
possessed by certain groups calling themselves revolutionary, I reas-
sert, as is incumbent upon a pedagogy of hope, the position taken
up and argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed against sectarianisms,
which always eviscerate, as well as the position I maintain there in
defense of a critical radicalism.

The preponderant climate with the factions of the Left was actu-
ally one of sectarianism, which, along with rejecting history as op-
portunity, generates and proclaims a kind of “liberation fatalism.”
Socialism is on its way. . . necessarily. Carried to its ultimate conse-
quences, then, an understanding of history as “liberation fatalism”
prescinds from the struggle, from an engagement in the creation of
democratic socialism as a job to do in history. Thus, it conjures away
the ethic of struggle and the fineness of the striving. I believe, or
rather I am convinced, that we have never needed radical positions,
in the sense of the radicalness I advocate in Pedagogy of the Op-
“pressed, as we need them today. We need them if we are to get
beyond, on the one hand, sectarianisms founding themselves on
universal, exclusive truths; and on the other, “pragmatic” accommo-
dations to the facts, as if the facts had turned immutable. Each
faction would have its immutability to work with—the former, or

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 5l

modern positions, just as the latter, or modernistic ones. Instead,
let us be postmodern: radical and utopian. Progressive. | |
_ [The last period of my time in Chile—to be precise, the period
during which I worked in the Institute for Ways and Means and
Research in Agrarian Reform (ICIRA),/ from the beginning of my
third year in the country onward—was one of the most productive
moments of my experience in exile. In the first place, I came to this
organization only after having already acquired a certain visceral
familiarity with the culture of the country, the habits of its peoples,
and with the rifts in political ideology within Christian Democracy
already clear. Then too, my activity in ICIRA was contemporaneous
with the first denunciations lodged against me in and by the more
radically rightist sectors of that party. These elements accused me
of things I had never done nor ever would do. I always find that one
of the ethical and political duties of someone in exile resides in
respect for the host country.

Although the condition of exile surely did not transform me into
a neutral intellectual, neither did it ever_afford me the right to
interfere in the party politics of the country. \I am not even inclined
to go into the facts surrounding the accusations against me, as the
latter could easily be demolished by their utter inconsistency. How-
ever, upon being informed of the existence of the first rumor, I took
the decision to write out in advance the texts of the talks I would
give on the subjects on which I was to speak in the training groups.
Along with becoming accustomed to writing them out, I got into
the habit of discussing them, every time I could, with two great
friends I worked with in the ICIRA, Marcela Gajardo, a Chilean,
today researcher and professor at the Faculdade Latino-Americana
de Ciéncias Sociais, and sociologist José Luiz Fiori, a Brazilian,
today a professor at Rio de Janeiro University.

The hours we spent together, discussing discoveries, and not just
my talks, talking over our doubts, wondering together, challenging
ourselves, recommending readings, being surprised, being fearful,
exerted such a spell on us that, nearly always, the time of day came
when our conversation was the only one to be heard in the building.
Everyone else had left the office, and there we were, trying to get
a better understanding of what was behind a peasant'’s reply to a
challenge with which he had been presented in a culture circle.

52 - PAULO FREIRE

With them I discussed various things I wanted to say in Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, which I was still composing. There is no denying
the good that both of their friendships did me, and the contributions
that their shrewd intellects added to my mind and my work.

At bottom, in the last analysis, my time at the Instituto de Desar-
rollo Agropecuaria, the Ministry of Education, and the Corporation
for Agrarian Reform; my serious work with their technological
teams, through which I found it possible to have a rich experience
almost throughout the country, with countless peasant communities,
interviewing their leaders; even simply the opportunity to have ex-
perienced a life in the historical atmosphere of the time—all of this
explained to me the doubts I had had that had led to my exile,
deepened my hypotheses, assured me of my positions.

It was in the intense experience I was having in Chilean society—
my own experience of their experience, which always sent me back
in my mind to my Brazilian experience, whose vivid memory I had
brought with me into exile—that I wrote Pedagogy of the Op-

pressed, in 1967 and 1968. Now that that composition has “come of
age,” I take it once more in hand. To look at it again, rethink it,
restate it. And to do some “new ’ saying, as well: the text in which
it is now being said again has its own word to say, as well, and one
that, in the same manner, speaks for itself, by speaking of hope.

In more or less a conversational tone—in “conversation” not only
with the reader now seeking a living contact with Pedagogy of the
Oppressed for the first time, but with those who have read it fifteen,
twenty years ago, and who, at this moment, as they read this reflec-
tion on it, are preparing to read it again—I should like to focus in
on a few points through which I might be able to make a better
restatement of what I have already said.

I think that an interesting point to begin with might be the actual
creation, or procreation, of the book. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
enwraps the procreation of ideas of course, but thereby it enfolds
as well the moment or the moments of activity in which those ideas
were generated, together with the moments at which they were put
down on paper. Indeed, ideas that need to be argued to—which
imply other ideas, ideas that have come to be restated in various
“corners of texts to which authors feel obliged to return from time
to time—become generated throughout these authors’ practice,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 53

within the greater social practice of which the ideas are a part. It is
in this sense that I have spoken of the memories that I brought into
exile, of which some had been formed in childhood long ago, but
are still of genuine importance today for an understanding of my
understanding or of my reading of the world. This is also the reason
why I have spoken of the exercise to which I always devoted myself
in exile—wherever the “loan context” was, the context in which, as
I gained experience in it, I thought and rethought my relations with
and in the original context. But as ideas, positions, to be made
explicit and explained, to be argued in the text, have first seen the
light of day in the action-reflection-action in which we are en-
wrapped (as we are touched by memories of happenings in old
fabrics), thus the moment of writing becomes as a time of creation
and re-creation, as well, of the ideas with which we come to our
desk. The time of writing, let me say again, is always preceded by /
one of speaking of the ideas that will be set down on paper. At least
this was the way it was with me. Speaking of ideas before writing
about them, in conversations with friends, in seminars, in talks, was
also a way not only of testing them, but of re-creating them, of giving
them second birth. Their edges could be better honed down when
the thinking managed to reach written form through another disci-
pline, another set of systematics. In this sense, to write is also to |
redo what has been thought out in various moments of our practice,
of our relations-with; to write is as much to re-create, as much to
restate what has been said previously, during the time of our activ-
ity—just as much as serious reading requires of the one doing it a
rethinking of the already-thought, a rewriting of the written, and a
rereading, as well, of what before being turned into the writing of
the author was some reading of his or her own.

I spent a year or more talking about aspects of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. I spoke with friends that visited me, I discussed it in
seminars and courses. One day my daughter Madalena came to me
to delicately call my attention to something. She suggested greater
restraint on my eagerness to talk about the as-yet-unwritten Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed. I did not have the strength to abide by her
suggestion. I continued, passionately, to speak of the book as if—
and as a matter of fact this was true—I were learning to write it.

I shall never be able to forget something about this oral period

54 - PAULO FREIRE

of Pedagogy of the Oppressed—an entire address in New York, my
first, in 1967.

It was my first visit to the United States, where I had been invited
by Father Joseph Fitzpatrick and Monsignor Robert Fox, who is
now deceased.

It was an exceedingly important visit for me, especially because
of what I was able to observe in places where blacks and Puerto
Ricans were discriminated against. I visited these places by invita-
tion of educators working with Fox. There was a great deal of similar-
ity between what they were doing in New York and what I was doing
in Brazil. The first one to notice the resemblances had been Ivan
Illich, who then proposed to Fitzpatrick and Fox that they bring
me to New York.

In my trips and visits to the various centers the two priests main-
tained in areas of New York, I was able to verify, seeing them all
over again, behaviors expressive of the “wiliness” or “cunning” de-
manded of the oppressed if they are to survive.j1 saw and heard
things in New York that were “translations —not just linguistic ones,
of course, but emotional ones, as well—of much of what I had heard
in Brazil, and was hearing more recently in Chile. The “why” of the
behavior was the same. Only the form—-what I might call “trap-
pings’ —and the content, were different. | "'' RY iA nee

There is a case, among these, which I report in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, that it will do no harm to take another look at here,
somewhat more extensively.

In one home, with blacks and Puerto Ricans participating in the
group, the educator had a large blowup of a photograph carried in
and placed on the arms of a chair. It was a picture of a street—as it
happened, of the very street that ran in front of the building in
which we sat. In the photo, a near mountain of garbage could be
seen, piled on a corner of the street.

“What do you see in this picture?” asked the educator.

A silence ensued, as it always did, no matter where we were or
to whom we addressed the question. Those present were somehow
failing to recognize their own street. Then, emphatically, with false
assurance, one of them came out with: “A street in Latin America.”

“But the street signs are in English,” the educator now pointed
out.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 55

Another silence, broken by another attempt to hide the painful,
wounding, sorrowful truth. “Maybe a street in Latin America and
were teachin’ English down there. Or maybe a street in Africa.”

“Why not New York?”

“Because we re in the United States and we dont have nothin like
that here!” And the person speaking pointed to the photograph.

After another, longer silence, a third participant spoke up, and
said, with difficulty, and painfully, as if he were relieving himself of
some terrible burden: “Might as well admit it’s our street. Where
we live.” 7

As I recall that session now, so much like so many others I shared
in, as I remember how the educands defended themselves in the
analysis or “reading” of the codification (the photo), trying to hide |
the truth, I hear again in my mind something I once heard from
Erich Fromm, in Cuernavaca, Mexico: “This kind of educational
practice,’ he told me, in our first meeting, arranged by Ivan Illich,
at which I had told him how I thought of and practiced education,
“This kind of educational practice is a kind of historico-cultural,
political psychoanalysis.”

‘He was dead right, and his words were confirmed by the state-
ments of the educands, one by one, to the approving nods of the
others: “It’s a street in Latin America ... were there and were
teaching English,” or “It's a street in Africa,” or “We're the US, we
cant have anything like that.” Two nights before, I had assisted at
another meeting, with another group, likewise of Puerto Ricans and
blacks, where the discussion was about another fine photo. It was a
montage, representing ‘slices’ of New York—more than half-a-dozen
shots, one atop the other, representing socioeconomic conditions in
various areas of the city, in ascending order of “decency starting
with the bottom “slice.”

_Once the group had understood what the photo was supposed to
represent, the educator asked the group what part of New York in
the montage was where they lived. Realistically, the group might
have actually lived in the conditions in the second shot from the
bottom in the picture, at best.

There was silence, whispering, and opinion swapping. Finally
came the group’s decision. Their place third from the top!

On the way back to the hotel, sitting next to the educator, who

56 + PAULO FREIRE

was driving, I continued silently to think about the meetings, of the
basic need individuals exposed to such situations have—until they
accept themselves as individuals,and as a class, until they commit
themselves, until they struggle-++their need to deny the humiliating
truth, a truth that humiliates them precisely because they introject
the dominant ideology that sketches them as incompetent and guilty,
the authors of their own failures. And yet the actual “why” of those
. failures is to be found in the perversity of the system.

I thought as well of the moment, several evenings before, when
(with Carmen Hunter as simultaneous translator—one of the most
competent North American educators, even in those early days) I
spoke for the first time at length about Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
which I was to finalize only in the following year. And I compared
the reactions of the educands on those two nights with those of some
of the audience of my talk—educators and community organizers.

“Fear of freedom” had marked the reactions in all three meetings.
Flight from the real, an attempt to “tame’ the real through conceal-
ment of the truth.

At this very moment, as I recall these happenings and reactions
of times so long ago, something else, something very much like
them, comes to mind: an event at which I likewise assisted. It was
another case of an expression of the assimilation and interiorization
of the dominant ideology by the dominated themselves—I might
even say, as I put it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, an expression of
the oppressor “inhabiting” and dominating the half-defeated body
and soul of the oppressed one.

We were in the midst of the campaign for the governorship of the
State of Sado Paulo, in 1982. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, was
the Workers Party candidate, and, as a party activist, I attended
some of the meetings in outlying districts of the city. I did not attend
party assemblies, as I do not regard myself as sufficiently competent.
These were meetings at recreational clubs or neighborhood associa-
tions. At one of these meetings, a workman, some forty years of age,
stood up and criticized Lula and his candidacy. His main argument
was that he could never vote for somebody just like himself. “Lula’s
the.same as me,” said the workman, with conviction. “He dont know
how to talk. He dont talk the right kind o Portuguese to be in
government. Lula aint had no education. He ain't, like they say,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 57

‘well-read.’ Look,” he went on “—if Lula won, what would we do?
Think how embarrassed peopled be, if the queen o England was t
come here again. Lula’ wife ain't got no rose garden to receive the
queen! She cant be no First Lady!”

In New York, the concealing discourse, which looks for some other
geography in which to deposit the garbage, which was making it too
plain how discriminated against the audience was, was a discourse
of self-rejection. In the same way, it was a discourse of self-rejection,
rejection of his class, that the workman had pronounced who refused
to look at himself or to see in Lula, because he was a worker himself,
a protest against the world that rejected him.

In the most recent presidential campaign, the Northeasterner
who worked with us in our house voted, in the first two rounds, for
Collor. She told us, with absolute assurance, that she “didnt have
anybody to vote for’ who would have been a candidate favorable to
her own interests.

Basically, she must have agreed with many of the elitists of this
country: persons who refer to themselves as menas gente cannot
imagine any of their own number being president. To say menas
gente, “lesser people,” means, when all is said and done, that you
are menos gente, “less people’ in the adverbial sense of “less”: less
completely people.

I went back to Chile. Presently I found myself in a new phase of
the gestation process of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I began to use index cards, titling and numbering each one ac-
cording to what was written on it. I always carried some paper in
my pockets, or even a little notepad. Whenever an idea occurred to
me—regardless of where I was, in a bus, on the street, in a restau-
rant, alone, with someone—I jotted down the idea. Sometimes it
was just a phrase.

Then in the evening, back home, after dinner, I worked on the
idea or ideas I had jotted down, expanding them on two, three, or
more file cards. Then I put a title on each card, and a number, in
ascending order.

I started working on ideas I culled from reading I had done, as
well. There were times when a statement by an author would make
a light go on in my head. It would spark a series of reflections in

}

58 - PAULO FREIRE

me that might never have been a concern of the author of the book
I was reading.

Other times, what one or another author would say would lead
me to reflections in the same area as that with which he or she was
dealing, but reinforcing some position of mine and making it more
clear to me.

In many cases, the sort of thing that challenged me, and about
which I wrote on file cards, were statements, or questions, either of
peasants whom I was interviewing and whom I had heard discussing
codifications in culture circles, or of agricultural technologists,
agronomists, or other educators, whom I made sure I kept meet-
ing in training seminars. What kept me from ever looking down
on or simply belittling “common sense” may have been the always-
respectful contact I had with it, ever since the faraway days of my
experience in the Brazilian Northeast, coupled with the never-failing
certitude within me thatLin order to get beyond “common sense,”
you had to use it|Jast as it is unacceptable to advocate an educational
practice that is satisfied with rotating on the axis of “common sense, »
so neither is an educational practice acceptable that sets at naught
the “knowledge of living experience’ and simply starts out with the
educators systematic cognition.

The educator needs to know that his or her “here” and “now” are
nearly always the educands “there” and “then, Even though the
educators dream is not only to render his or her “here-and-now”
accessible to educands, but to get beyond their own “here-and-now”
with them, or to understand and rejoice that educands have gotten
beyond their “here” so that this dream is realized, she or he must
begin with the educands “here,” and not with her or his own. At
the very least, the educator must keep account of the existence of
his or her educands “here” and respect it. Let me put it this way:

(you never get there by starting from there, you get there by starting
~ from some here\This means, ultimately, that the educator must not
be ignorant of, underestimate, or reject any of the “knowledge of
(living experience” with which educands come to schoo), ‘,

I shall return to this subject again, as it appears t6 me to be
central to a discussion of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and not only
of the book by that name, but of the actual pedagogy of the op-
pressed itself.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 59

Then came the time when I began, occasionally, to practically
“play” with the file cards. I would calmly read a series of them, say,
ten of them, and I would try to discover, first, whether there were
any holes to fill in their thematic sequence; and second, whether a
careful reading of them called forth in me or gave rise to the emer-
gence of new topics. Basically, my “idea cards” turned into seed
cards for other ideas, other topics.

Sometimes—suppose, between card number eight and card num-
ber nine—I would sense a vacuum, and begin to work on it. Then
I would renumber the cards accordingly, so that they would still be
in numerical sequence.

As I recall, now, all of this mechanical work—and it has its nostal-
gia for me—I admit that it would have saved time and effort, and
been more efficient, if I had used a computer from time to time,
even a little one like the one that my wife and I have today.

But thanks to that mechanical effort, once I began to write the
text—in July 1967, taking the opportunity of a vacation period—in
two weeks of work, sometimes working all night long, I wrote the
first three chapters of Pedagogy. When that much had been typed
up—which I thought would be the whole book, just those first three
chapters—I turned it over to my great friend, whom I shall never
forget, and with whom I always learned so much—Ernani Maria ~
Fiori, to write the preface. When Fiori gave me back his excellent
essay in December 1967, I took a few hours at home that night to
read through the entire manuscript, from his preface to the last
word of chapter 3, which I then thought of as the last.

The year before, in 1966, Josué de Castro,” owner of a vanity as
lush as that of Gilberto Freyre, but, like the latter, a vanity that
disturbed no one, had spent some days in Santiago. One evening
when he had no official tasks to perform, we sat together, conversing
freely, in one of Santiago's lovely parks, Josué, Almino Affonso, and
L Talking about what he was writing, Josué suddenly told us: “Til
suggest a good habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book,
or article, let it ‘marinate for three months, four months, in a
drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always
change ‘something,’ concluded Josué, with his hand on the shoul-
der of one of us.

I took the risk of following his suggestion. The very night of the

60 - PAULO FREIRE

day Fiori gave me his text, after reading it and the three chapters
of Pedagogy, I locked everything away in my “box” in my study, and
left it there for two months.

I cannot deny the curiosity, and even more, a certain yearning,
that the text provoked in me as it lay there, locked away, “all, all
alone.” Sometimes I had a powerful urge to take it out and read it
again; but I thought it would be interesting, too, to take a certain
distance from it. So I restrained myself.

There in my study, one night a little more than two months later,
I sat down with it a few hours to get reacquainted. It was almost as
if I had found an old friend again. In fact, I read it with great
emotion—slowly, without even wanting to finish it very soon—the
whole text, page by page. (It would have been hard to imagine, just
then, that twenty-four years later I would be doing much the same
thing, several times, not with the manuscript, but with the book
itself—to rethink it, to restate it.)

I did not make many important changes in it. But I did make the
basic discovery that the text was unfinished. It needed one more
chapter. And so it came about that I wrote the fourth and last chap-
ter, taking advantage, now of lunch period in training seminars in
the vicinity of Santiago, now in hotels in cities or towns further away,
where I also went to give seminars. After dinner, I would fairly race
to my room, and seclude myself there the whole night through,
writing chapter 4, till early the next day, when I would begin the
work of my seminar once again. I remember now that the only text
that could take me away from my writing work was Antonio Callado’s
excellent Quarup.

In those days I was still able to read while the car was lapping up
the miles. Thus it was that, on one of my trips to the South of Chile,
after taking the opportunity of highway time to spend some hours
with my book, I finished reading Quarup in the hotel, filled with
emotion, as the first light dawned. Then I wrote a letter to Callado,
which I was too shy ever to mail. I am sorry to say that the letter
was lost, along with letters written to me, when we moved to the
United States in 1969.

The gusto with which I gave myself to that exercise, the task of
fairly spending myself in writing and thinking (mutually inseparable
in the creation or the production of the text), compensated for the

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE : 6l

lack of sleep with which I returned from trips. I no longer remember
the names of the hotels where I wrote parts of the fourth chapter
of Pedagogy, but I still retain the sensation of pleasure with which
I read, before going to sleep, the last pages I had written.

At home, in Santiago, not rare were the times when, so involved
in my work, and gratified by it, I was surprised by the morning sun
stealing into the little room which I had converted into a library at
500 Alcides de Gasperi Street, Apoquindo, Santiago, and lighting it
up—sun and birds, morning, new day. Then I would look out the
window, at the little garden Elza had made, the rosebushes she
had planted.

I do not know whether the house would still be there, and still
be painted blue, as it was at the time.

I should not be able to rethink Pedagogy of the Oppressed without
thinking upon, without remembering, some of the places where I
wrote it, but especially one of them, the house where I lived and
was happy, and from where I left Chile, carrying longings, suffering
at having to leave but hopeful of being able to respond to the chal-
lenges that were waiting for me.

With the fourth chapter finally ready, I looked at the first three
again and touched them up, then I handed over the whole text to
a typist. Next I made several copies, which I distributed among
Chilean friends, and some Brazilian companions in exile and other
friends.

In the acknowledgments, when the first Brazilian edition ap-
peared—which only became possible after the book had already
been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German,
due to the climate of repression in which we lived—I left out the
names of some friends, as well as those of some of my companions
in exile.

No one failed to come running, with his or her encouragement,
plus concrete suggestions—for the clarification of a point here, for
a stylistic improvement there, and so on.

Now, so many years later, and even more convinced how doggedly
we must struggle lest ever again, in the name of freedom, democ-
racy, ethics, and respect for the common welfare, we should again
have to experience the denial of freedom, outrage to democracy,
deception, and contempt for the common weal, such as the coup

62 - PAULO FREIRE

d’état imposed on us on April 1, 1964 (which picturesquely dubbed
itself a revolution), I should like to list the names of all who inspired
me with their word, and express to them my sincere thanks: Marcela
Gajardo, Jacques Chonchol, Jorge Mellado, Juan Carlos Poblete,
Rati Velozo, and Pelli, Chileans. Paulo de Tarso and Plinio Sampaio,
Almino Affonso, Maria Edy, Flavio Toledo, Wilson Cantoni, Ernani
Fiori, Jodo Zacariotti, José Luiz Fiori, and Antonio Romanelli,
Brazilians.

There is another connection between Pedagogy of the Oppressed
and the perverse, antidemocratic climate of the military regime that
came crashing down on us with such remarkable, hateful fury, that
I should like to bring out.

Even though I knew that the book could not be published here—
have its first edition in Portuguese, the language in which it was
originally written—I did want to get the typescript into the hands
of Fernando Gasparian, director of Paz e Terra, which was going to
publish it. The question that arose was how to see to the safety not
only of the material, but also, and above all, of the courier. At this
point, in the early 1970s, we were already staying in Geneva.

I had mentioned the problem to Swiss scholars, professors at the
University of Geneva. One of them, who, besides being a professor,
was a national councilor, Jean Ziegler, as he was about to leave for
Rio de Janeiro on an academic assignment, offered to carry the
typescript to Brazil personally. I accepted his offer, since, with his
diplomatic passport plus his Swiss nationality, nothing untoward
would befall him. He would get through the passport check and
customs without questions or searches.

A. few days later, Gasparian discreetly acknowledged receipt of
the material, asking me to await more favorable times for its publica-
tion. I sent the text toward the end of 1970, when the book was
already in its first edition in English, or early in 1971. Its publication
in Brazil, its first printing, was possible only in 1975. Meanwhile a
countless number of Brazilians had read it, in foreign-language edi-
tions arriving here by strokes of shrewdness and courage. I came to
know, at this time, a young North American sister who worked in
the Northeast, who said that, on her return trips from the United
States, she had gotten into Brazil several times with a number of
copies of Pedagogy, covered in book jackets with religious titles on

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 63

them. In this fashion, her friends, who worked in the outlying dis-
tricts of Northeastern cities, were able to read the book and discuss
it even before its publication in Portuguese.

At about the same time, I received in Geneva, hand-delivered,
an excellent letter from a group of workers in S40 Paulo, of whom
I have unfortunately since lost track. They had studied, together, a
copy of the original that someone had typed out. It is a pity that so
little is left of my Geneva archives. Among many a good thing that
was lost, was that letter. But I remember how they ended it. “Paul,”
they said, or words to this effect, “keep on writing—but next time
lay it on a little thicker when you come to those scholarly types that
come to visit as if they had revolutionary truth by the tail. You know,
the ones that come looking for us to teach us that were oppressed
and exploited and to tell us what to do.”

Some time after Ziegler, that excellent intellectual, had gotten
the typescript into Gasparian’s hands, he, Ziegler, published a book
that immediately became a best-seller—La Suisse au-dessus de tout
soupcon (Switzerland: above all suspicion), in which he disclosed
Swiss secrets that were altogether too touchy, especially in the area
of the hidden bank accounts of a certain type of Third World folk.
Ziegler wounded innumerable interests with his book, and has suf-
fered reprisals that have been by no means easy to deal with. Re-
cently, Jean Ziegler is being put under pressure, and major
restrictions, due to the publication of another best-seller of his, in
which he discusses the “laundering” of drug-traffic money. As a
national councilor, or deputy, from the canton of Geneva, Ziegler
recently had his parliamentary immunity restricted by his col-
leagues, on the allegation that he writes as a professor, a scholar, an
academician, while that his parliamentary immunity pertains only
to his activity in the Parliament. And so he can be put on trial for
what he has written as a scholar.

In view of all of this, and mindful of the unselfish favor he per-
formed in serving as the courier of the forbidden book's typescript,
I should like to make public here my solidarity with the great intel-
lectual in whom I see no separation between the professor—the
serious, competent scholar—and the watchful representative of the
Swiss people, the national councilor.

64 - PAULO FREIRE

Finally, I owe one last word of acknowledgment, and posthumous
gratitude: to Elza, for all she did in making Pedagogy a reality.

I find that one of the best things that any of us, man or woman,
can experience in life, is a loving tenderness in our relationships,
however bespattered, from time to time, those relationships may be
with a lack of compassion, which simply prove that we are, after all,

“ordinary people.”

This is the experience I had with Elza, on account of which, when
you get right down to it, I became predisposed for a re-creation of
myself under the equally unselfish care of another woman who,
speaking to me and of us, writes in her excellent book of having to
come to me to ‘reinvent things lost—” hers, with the death of Raul,
her first spouse, and mine, with that of Elza—‘life, with love.”*

All during the time I spoke about Pedagogy of the Oppressed
with other persons and with Elza, Elza was always an attentive and
critical listener, and became my first, likewise critical, reader when
I began the phase of actual writing of the text.

Very early in the morning, she would read the pages I had been
writing until daybreak, and had left arranged on the table.

Sometimes she was unable to contain herself. She would wake me
up and say, with humor, “I hope this book won't send us into exile!”

I am happy to be able to record this sense of gratitude with
the freedom with which I do so, without fear of being accused of
being sentimental.

My concern, in this hopeful work, as I have demonstrated to this
point, is to stir my memory and challenge it, like an excavation in
time, so that I can show you the actual process of my reflection, my
pedagogical thought and its development, of which the book is a
step—just as my pedagogical thinking is actually developing right
in this Pedagogy of Hope, as I discuss the hope with which I wrote
Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Hence my attempt to discover—in old weavings, facts, and deeds
of childhood, youth, and maturity, in my experience with others,

“Ana Maria Aratjo Freire, Analfabetismo no Brasil: Da ideologia da interdicao
do corpo a ideologia nacionalista ou de como deixar sem ler e escrever desde as
Catarinas (paraguacu), Filipas, Anas, Genebras, Apolénias e Gracias até os
Severinos (Sao Paulo: Cortez, 1989).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 65

within the events, within the instants in the general, dynamic pro-

cess—not only Pedagogy of the Oppressed as it was being gestated, -

but my life itself. Indeed, it is in the interplay of the fabrics of which
life forms a part that life itself wins meaning. And Pedagogy of the
Oppressed is an important moment of my life—my life of which the
book expresses a certain “instant’—demanding of me at the same
time that I demonstrate the necessary consistency with what I have
said in it.

Among the responsibilities that, for me, writing sets before me,
not to say imposes on me, there is one that I always take on. Already
experiencing, as I write, the consistency obtaining between my writ-
ten word and my speech and my deeds, past and present, I likewise
come to experience the importance of intensifying this consistency,
all through the course of my existence. Consistency, however, is
not paralysis. In the process of acting-and-thinking, speaking-and-

writing, I can change position. Thus my consistency, still as neces-_

sary as ever, comes about within new parameters. What is impossible
for me is inconsistency, even recognizing the impossibility of an
absolute consistency. At bottom, this quality or this virtue, consis-
tency, requires of us an insertion into a permanent process of search,
demands of us patience and humility, which are also virtues, in our
dealings with others. And at times, for any number of reasons, we
find ourselves lacking these latter virtues, which are fundamental
for the exercise of another: consistency.

In this phase of the resumption of Pedagogy, I shall be seizing on
certain particular aspects of the book, whether or not they have
provoked criticism down through the years, with a view to explaining
myself better, clarifying angles, asserting and reasserting positions.

Let me say a little something about language: about my taste
for metaphor, and about the sexist mark I left on Pedagogy of the
Oppressed—just as, before that, on Educagdo como pratica da liber-
dade. It seems to me not only important, but necessary, that I now
do this.

I shall begin precisely with the sexist langauge that marks the
whole book, and of\my debt to countless North American women,
from various parts of the United States, who wrote to me, from late
in 1970 into early 1971, a few months after the first edition of my
book had come out in New York ft was if they had gotten together

66 - PAULO FREIRE

to send me their critical eters which came into my hands in Ge-
neva over the course of three months, almost uninterruptedly.

Invariably, in their comments on the book, which seemed to them
to contain a great deal of good, and to constitute a contribution to
their struggle, they also spoke of what they regarded as a large
contradiction. In discussing oppression and liberation, in criticizing,
with just indignation, oppressive structures, | they said, I used sexist,
and therefore discriminatory, language, in which women had no
place. Almost all of those who wrote to me cited one or other passage
in the book, like the one, for example, that I myself now excerpt
from the Brazilian edition: “In this fashion, as their consciousness
of the situation grows in acuity, men ‘appropriate that situation to
themselves as a historical reality that is thereby subject to transfor-
mation by them [masc.].”* Why not by women too?

I remember reading the first two or three letters I received as if
it were yesterday, and how, under the impact of my conditioning by
an authoritarian, sexist, ideology, I reacted. And it is important to
bring out that, here at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971,
I had already intensely experienced the political struggle, had spent
five or six years of exile, had read a world of serious works, but in
reading the first criticisms that I received, still said to myself, or
repeated, what I had been taught in my boyhood: “Now, when I say
‘men, that of course includes ‘women.” And why are men not in-
cluded when we say, “Women are determined to change the world”?
No man would feel included in any discourse by any speaker, or in
the text of any author, who would write, “Women are determined
to change the world.” After all, men certainly dislike it when I say
to a nearly all-female audience, but with two or three men in it,
“Todas vocés deveriam ...” (“You should all [fem.] .. .”). For the
men present, either I do not know Portuguese syntax, or else I am
trying to “have some fun” at their expense. The one thing they
cannot think is that they are included in my discourse. How can one
explain, except on an ideological basis, the rule according to which,
in a room filled with dozens of women and only one man, I have to
say, “Eles todos séo trabalhadores e dedicados” (“You are all workers,

*Paulo Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido, 17th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra,
1987), p. 74.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 67

and dedicated ones”), with all the variable terminations in the mas-
culine gender? Indeed it is not a grammatical problem, but an ideo-
logical one. |

It is in this sense that I have explicitly stated at the beginning of
these comments my debt to those women, whose letters I have
unfortunately lost as well, for having made me see how much ideol- |
ogy resides in language

I then wrote to all of them, one by one, acknowledging their
letters and thanking them for the fine help they had given me.

From that date forward, I have always referred to “woman and
man, or “human beings.” I had rather write an unattractive line
sometimes than omit to express my rejection of sexist language.

Now, in writing this Pedagogy of Hope, in which I rethink the
soul and body of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I shall beg the publish-
ing houses to get over their own sexist language. And let it not be
said that this is a minor problem. It is a major problem. Let it not
be said that, since the basic thing is to change a wicked world, re-
creating it in terms of making it less perverse, the debate over sexist
language is therefore of minor importance, especially since women
do not constitute a social class.

Discrimination against women, expressed and committed by sex-
ist discourse, and enfleshed in concrete practices, is a colonial way
of treating them, and therefore incompatible with any progressive
position, regardless of whether the person taking the position be a .
woman or a Man. -_

The rejection of a sexist ideology, which necessarily involves the
re-creation of language, is part of the possible dream of a change of .
the world. By that very fact, in writing or speaking a language no
longer colonial, I do so not in order to please women or displease
men, but in order to be consistent with my option for that less-
wicked world of which I have spoken before—just as I did not write
the book to which I now return in order to seem like a nice person
to the oppressed as individuals and as a class, nor simply to beat
over the head the oppressors as individuals or as a class. I wrote the
book as a political task I understood I had to perform.

It is not pure idealism, let it be further observed, to refuse to
await a radical change_in the world in order to begin to insist on a
change in language. Changing language is part of the process of

68 - PAULO FREIRE

changing the world.\The relationship, language-thought—world, is
a dialectical, processual, contradictory relationship. Obviously the
defeat of a sexist discourse, like the defeat of any authoritarian dis-
course, requires of us, or imposes upon us the necessity, that, con-
comitantly with the new, democratic, antidiscriminatory discourse,
we engage ourselves in democratic practices, as well.

What would be intolerable would be simply pronouncing the
democratic, antidiscriminatory discourse and maintaining a colo-
nial practice.

An important aspect, under the heading of language, which I
should like to emphasize is how much I have always been impressed,
in my experiences with urban and rural workers, with their meta-
phorical language: the wealth of symbolism in their speech. Almost
in parentheses, I should call attention to the abundant bibliography,
at the moment, of works by linguists and philosophers of language
on metaphor and its use in literature and science. Here, however,
my concern is to stress how much popular speech, and the absence
of rough edges therein (there's a metaphor), has always gripped and
excited me. From my adolescence, in Jaboatéo, my ears began to
open to the sonority of popular speech, to which would later accrue,
when I was with SESI, a growing understanding of popular seman-
tics and, necessarily, syntax.

My long conversations with the fishers in their hemp shelters on
the Pontas de Pedra coast, in Pernambuco, like my dialogues with
peasants and urban laborers, in the gullies and hillocks of Recife,
not only familiarized me with their language, but sharpened my
sensitivity to the lovely way they spoke of themselves—no matter
that it be of their sorrows—and the world. Lovely and sure.

One of the best examples of this loveliness and this sureness is to
be found in the discourse of a peasant of Minas Gerais*! in dialogue
with professor and anthropologist Carlos Brandao, in one of his many
field-research expeditions. Brandéo recorded a long conversation
with Antonio Cicero de Soza, or Cico, part of which he used as the
preface of the book he was editing.*

“Carlos Brandao et al., A questao politica da educagéo popular (Sao Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1980).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 69

Now this gen]’man comes up and asks me, “Cico, what is edjica-
tion?” Yup. Good. What do I think? I say. Well, see, you say
“edjication”; an’ I say “edjication.” Same word, right? Pronuncia-
tion, I mean. It’s jist one word: “edjication.” But then I ask to
the genI'man: Is it the same thing? Is it the same thing that
folks talk about when they say that word? There I say: No. I say
to the gen'’man like this: Nope, it’s not. I don’t think so.

Edjication—when the gen]’man comes up and says “edjica-
tion,” he’s comin’ from his world. The same. . . ‘nother. When
its me talkin’ I come from ‘nother place, nother world. I come
from down in the holler where poor folks lives, like people say.
Whatre you comparin it with, what's this word comin up with?
With school, aint it? With that fine perfesser, good clothes,
smart, new book, spiffy, notebook, fountain pen, all real special,
everything just like it should be—from his world, with schoolin’,
what changes folks into a doctor. Fact? I think so, but I think a
ways off, since I never seen that roun’ here.

I once proposed to a group of students of a graduate course at
PUC-SP* that they read Cico’s text and analyze it. Make a critical
analysis.

We spent four three-hour sessions reading Cicos four pages.

His thematics, which we gathered as we got into the text, as we
unwrapped it, was rich and manifold, and the time just flew by. We
never took breaks when we were discussing Cigo—we found the
work that exciting.

Something I should like very much to have been able to do, and
that, though it was not done, I still have hope of doing some day, is
to have discussed or come to discuss this text of Cigo with rural and/
or urban workers. The experience would consist in starting with a
reading of Cico’s discourse, and joining my own to it. First, we would
take Cico’s text and talk about it. Then it would be my turn to teach
any of a number of elements of content about which, like Cico, if
possibly with lesser power of analysis than his, the workers would
have a “knowledge of living experience.” But the basic thing would
be for me to challenge them to go more deeply into the meaning
of the themes or content and thereby learn them. ;

I cannot resist repeating: teaching is not the pure mechanical
transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive,
docile students. Nor can I resist repeating that starting out with the

70 - PAULO FREIRE

educands’ knowledge does not mean circling around this knowledge
ad infinitum. Starting out means setting off down the road, getting
going, shifting from one point to another, not sticking, or staying.
I have never said, as it is sometimes suggested or said that I have
said, that we ought to flutter spellbound around the knowledge of
the educands like moths around a lamp bulb.

[Starting with the “knowledge of experience had” in order_to get
beyond it is not staying in that knowledge.|
=§Some years ago I visited a capital of the Northeast at the invitation
of educators working in rural areas of the state. They wanted to have
me with them for the three days they were going to devote to an
appraisal of their work with various groups of peasants. At one mo-
ment in one of the sessions, the question of language came up—
the matter of the sonorous lilt of the peasants’ speech, the wealth of
their symbolism, and so on. One of those present then recounted
the following.

For almost two months, he said, he had wanted to be in on the
Sunday meetings a group of peasants regularly held after the nine
oclock Sunday Mass. He had mentioned his wish to the leader, but
the green light never seemed to come.

One day he was finally invited. But as the meeting opened, and
as he was being introduced to the group, he had to listen to the
following speech by the leader.

“Today we have a new member, and he’s not a peasant. He's a
well-read person. I talked about this with you at our last meeting,
whether he could come or not.”

Then the leader gave the group a bit of personal data about the
new member. Finally, he turned to the candidate himself, and, fixing
him intently, said: “We have something very important to tell you,
new friend. If youre here to teach us that were exploited, don't
bother. We know that already. What we don’t know . . . and need
to know from you . . . is, if youre going to be with us when the

chips are down.”
_ That is, they might have said, in more sophisticated terms,
whether his solidarity went any further than his intellectual curios-
ity. Whether it went beyond the notes that he would be taking in
meetings with them. Whether he would be with them, at their side,
| in the hour of their repression.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE «: 7]

Another educator, perhaps encouraged by the story he had just
heard, offered his own testimonial, recounting the following.

He was taking part, with other educators, in a one-day workshop
with peasant leaders. Suddenly one of the peasants spoke up: “The
way this conversations’ss goin’ nobody's gonna git it. Nope. "Cause
as far as you herere concerned’—and he pointed to the group of
educators—“youre talkin’ salt, and these people here,” meaning the
others, the peasants, “they wanna know "bout seasonin’, and salt aint
but part of the seasonin’.”

As far as the peasants were concerned, the educators were getting
lost in the view of reality that I am wont to call “focalistic,” while
what they wanted and needed was an understanding of the relation-
ships among the component “partialities” of the totality. They were
not denying the salt, it was just that they wanted to understand it
in its relationship with the other ingredients that constituted the
seasoning as a totality.

Speaking of this popular wealth, from which we have so much to
learn, I recall suggestions I used to make to various educators who
had frequent contact with urban and rural laborers, and who would
go and record stories, snatches of conversations, phrases, expres-
sions, in order to supply material for semantic, syntactical, prosodic
(and so on) analyses of popular discourse. At a certain moment in a
like undertaking, it would be possible to offer various groups of
laborers, as if they were codifications, the stories or the phrases, or
the scraps of discourse, already studied, with the collaboration of
sociolinguists, especially, and test the understanding the educators
had had of the phrases, the stories, by submitting them to the
laborers. It would be an exercise in a comparison and contrast, be-
tween the two syntaxes, the dominant and the popular.

When it comes to language there is something else I should like
to bring up here. It is something that I have never accepted—on the
contrary, something that I have always rejected. It is the assertion, or
even insinuation, that fine, elegant writing, is not scholarly. A
scholar does difficult writing, not fine writing.| Language’s esthetic
moment, it has always seemed to me, ought to be pursued by all of
us, including rigorous scholars. There is not the least incompatibility
between rigor in the quest for an understanding and knowledge of

72. + PAULO FREIRE

the world, and beauty of form in the expression of what is found in
that world.

It would'be an absurdity for there to be, or seem to have to if
some necessary association between ugliness and scientific rigor.

It is not by chance that my first readings in Gilberto Freyre, in
the 1940s, impressed me so much, just as rereading him today be-
comes a moment of esthetic pleasure as well

Personally, ever since I was young, I have liked a discourse with-
out sharp edges, regardless of whether it be pronounced by a peas-
ant, in all naiveté about the world, or by a sociologist of the stature
of Gilberto Freyre. Few people in this country, I think, have dealt
with language with the good taste that Gilberto has applied.

I have never forgotten the impact, on the adolescents whose
teacher of Portuguese I was in the 1940s, of the reading I used to
do with them of passages from Gilberto’s works. I invariably took
him as an example when speaking to them of the problem of where
to put objective pronouns in sentences, and emphasizing what a
fine style he had. It would have been hard, regardless of whether
he was being grammatical or not, for Gilberto Freyre to write some-
thing unlovely.

It was he who led me, without a moment's hesitation, in a first
esthetic experience, to make my option between “Ela vinha-se
aproximando,” and “Ela vinha se aproximando’—both meaning,
“She gradually drew near.” I chose the latter? Why? On account of
the sonority resulting from uncoupling the se from the auxiliary verb
vinha and “releasing” it to be attracted by the a of the main verb,
aproximando. It becomes s‘a when it is released from the first verb,
and, as it were, nestles up to the a of aproximando.

A writer commits no sin against scholarship if, while rejecting the
narrow, insipid doctrine we find in grammars, he or she never says
or writes, however, a “Tinha acabado-se” (“She had passed on”) in-
stead of “releasing” the se from the acabado and sandwiching it
between the other words, or a “Se vocé ver Pedro” (“If you see
Peter’) using the infinitive instead of the indicative, or a “Houveram
muitas pessoas na audiéncia” (“There were many persons in the
audience” instead of “Many persons were in the audience’), or a
“Fazem muitos anos que voltei” (“It's been many years since I re-
turned” instead of “I returned many years ago”).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 73

A writer commits no sin against scholarship by refusing to wound
the ear and good taste of the person reading or hearing his or her
discourse, and may not, in so refusing, simplistically be accused of
being “rhetorical,” or of succumbing to the “fascination of a linguistic
elegance as an end in itself.” (On the contrary, otherwise a scholarly
writer ought to be accused of having succumbed to the tastelessness
of a vacuous flow of words.) Or pointed to as “pretentious,” or “snob-
bish,” and seen as ridiculously pompous in his or her way of writing
or speaking.

If sociologist Gilberto Freyre—not to mention anyone else, for
our purposes just now—had placed any credence in this (about an
alleged connection between scholarly rigor and contempt for the

esthetic treatment of language), we should not have, today, pages
like this one:

The word Northeast is a word, today, disfigured by the expres-
sion “Northeast projects —that is, “antidrought projects.” The
hinterland of dry sand creaking under your feet. The hinterland
of hard landscapes, which hurt your eyes. The cacti known as
Peru cereus. The angular oxen and horses. The light shadows,
like some souls from another world who fear the sunshine.

But that Northeast of humans and animals stretching almost
into El Greco figures is only one side of the Northeast. The
other Northeast? Older than the first. This time, the Northeast
of fat trees, deep shadows, sluggish oxen, vigorous folk all but
puffed up into Sancho Panzas by mill honey, fish cooked with
manioc mush, wearisome, monotonous work, rotgut rum, half-
fermented sugarcane juice, cocoa beans, worms, erysipelas or
“St.Anthony’s fire,” idleness, sicknesses that make a person bloat
up, the special disease you get from eating dirt.

And further on: “An oily Northeast, where at night the moon
seems to drip a fat grease of things and people. ’* -

As for Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there were criticisms like those
reported above—pompousness—as well as of what was regarded as
the unintelligibility of my text—criticisms of a language considered
all but impossible to understand, a recherché, elitist language that ,
betrayed my “want of respect for the people.”

*Freyre, Nordeste.

74 +- PAULO FREIRE

In remembering some, and rereading others, of these criticisms,
today, I remember a meeting I had in Washington, DC, in 1972
with a group of young persons interested in discussing certain topics
in the book.

Among them was a black man, of about fifty, who was involved in
problems of community organization. During the discussions, from
time to time, after some visible difficulty of understanding on the
part of one of the young persons, he would speak up in an attempt
to clarify the point, and always did so very well.

At the end of the meeting he came up to me with a friendly
smile, and said: “If some of these youngsters tell you they don't
understand you because of your English, dont believe them. It’s a
question of the thinking that’s expressed in your language. Their
problem is, they dont think dialectically. And they don't yet have
any actual experience of the hard life led by the sectors of society
that suffer discrimination.”

It is also interesting to observe that some of the criticisms, of
the “hard, snobbish” language of Pedagogy in the English-language
edition of my book, attributed a certain amount of responsibility to
Myra Ramas, my friend, and the book’s competent, serious transla-
tor. Myra worked with a maximum of professional precision, and
absolute dedication. During the process of translation of the text,
she would regularly consult with a group of friends. She would call
them on the phone and say, “Does this sentence make sense to
your” And she would read the passage she had just translated and
was having doubts about. Then again, when she had finished part
of a chapter, she would send a copy of the translation, along with
the original, to other friends, North Americans who knew Portu-
guese very well, like theologian Richard Shaull, who wrote the pref-
ace to the North American edition, and ask them for their opinion
and suggestions.

I was consulted by her myself, a number of times, during my
stint in Cambridge as visiting professor at Harvard. I remember
her patient inquiry into various hypotheses she had for translating
“inédito viavel,” one of my metaphors. Finally she selected, “un-
tested feasibility.”

Within the limits of my lack of authority in the English language,
I have to say that I have a very good feeling about Myra’s translation.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 75

And so, whenever I deal with English-language readers, in seminars,
in discussions, I have always taken responsibility for the “why” of
any criticisms they might make of the language of the book.

I also remember the opinion of the sixteen-year-old son of a black
woman who was an excellent student of mine at Harvard. I had
asked him to read Myra’s translation of the first chapter of Pedagogy,
which had just arrived in New York. The following week, I was
speaking with her and her son, whom I had asked to read the text.
“This book,” he said, “was written about me. It’s all about me.” Let
us even admit that he might have run into one or another word that
was foreign to his young intellectual experience. Even so, it did.
not deprive him of an understanding of the whole. His existential
experience, in a context of discrimination, rendered him sym-
pathetic to the text from the moment he began to read it.

Today, after so many words, with Pedagogy translated into count-
less languages, in which it has practically covered the globe, this
kind of criticism has significantly diminished. But there is some-
thing else.

And that is why I have stayed a bit with this question.

do not see the legitimacy of a student or teacher closing any
book, not just Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and simply declaring it
to be “unreadable” because he or she has not clearly understood
the meaning of a sentence. And especially, doing so without having
expended any effort/_without having behaved with the necessary —
seriousness of someone who does studies. There are many people
for whom to pause in the reading of a text as soon as difficulties
arise in an understanding of it, so that the reader should have to
have recourse to the ordinary work tools—dictionaries, including
those of philosophy, social sciences, etymology, or synonyms, or
encyclopedias—is a waste of time. No, on the contrary, the time
devoted to consulting dictionaries or encyclopedias for an elucida-
tion of what we are reading is study time, not wasted time. People
will occasionally just “keep on reading,” hoping that, magically, on
the next page, the word in question might “come up again’ in a
context in which they will see what it means without having had to ,
“lock it up.” |

Reading a text is a more serious, more exacting, enterprise than
this/ Reading a text is not a careless, sluggish “stroll through the

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76 - PAULO FREIRE

words.? Reading a text is learning the relationships among the words
in the composition of the discourse. It is the task of a critical, hum-
ble, determined “subject” or agent of learning, the reader.

Reading, as study, is a difficult, even painful, process at times,
but always a pleasant one as well. It implies that the reader delve
deep into the text, in order to learn its most profound meaning.
The more we do this exercise, in a disciplined way, conquering any
desire to flee the reading, the more we prepare ourselves for making
future reading less difficult.

- Most of all, the reading of a text requires that the one who does
it be convinced that ideologies will not die. The practical application
of this principle here means that the ideology with which the text
is drenched—or the ideology it conceals—is not necessarily that of
the one who is about to read it. Hence the need for an open, critical,
radical, and not sectarian, position on the part of the reader, without
which he or she will be closed to the text/ and prevented from
learning anything through it because it may argue positions that are
at odds with those of that reader. At times, ironically, the positions
are merely different, and not positively antagonistic.
<a many cases, we have not even read the author. We have read
bout the author, and without going to him or her, we accept criti-
isms age him or her. We adopt them as our own.

Professor Celso Beisiegel, pro-rector for degree candidacy at the
University of So Paulo, and one of this country’s leading intellectu-
als, once told me that, on a certain occasion, as he was taking part
in a group discussion on Brazilian education, he heard from one of
those present, referring to me, that my works were no longer im-
portant for the national debate on education. Curious, Beisiegel
decided to investigate. “What books of Paulo Freire have you stud-
ied?” he asked.

Without a moment's hesitation, the young critic replied, “None.
But I've read about him.”

It is absolutely fundamental, however, that an author be criticized
not on the basis of what is said about him or her, but only after an
earnest, devoted, competent reading of the actual author. Of course,
this does not mean that we need not read what has been or is being
said about him or her, as well.

Finally, the practice of an earnest reading of serious texts ulti-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 77

mately helps one to learn that reading as study is a broad process,
requiring time, patience, sensitivity, method, rigor, determination, —
and passion for knowledge. :

Without necessarily identifying the authors of particular criti-
cisms, nor even to the particular chapters of Pedagogy to which the
objections that I shall now report will refer, I shall extend the pres-
ent reflection by offering examples of judgments to which I ought
to respond, or repeat responses I have already made.

One of these judgments, which is from the 1970s, is one that
takes me precisely for what I criticize and combat. It takes me for
arrogant and elitist. It regards me as a “cultural invader,” and there-
fore as someone disrespectful of the cultural and class identitity of
the popular classes—the rural and urban workers. At bottom, this
type of criticism, when made of me, and therefore based on a dis- _
torted understanding of conscientizacao and a profoundly naive view —
of educational practice—as it seeks to regard that practice as a “neu-
tral” one, “at the service of the well-being of humanity’—is inca-
pable of perceiving that one of the finest things about this practice
is precisely that it is impossible to live it without running risks. For.
example, there is the risk of not being consistent—of saying one
thing and doing something else. And it is precisely the political
nature of educational practice, its helplessness to be “neutral,” that
requires of the educator his or her ethicalness. The task of educator
would be all too easy were it to be reducible to the imparting of
content that would not even need to be treated aseptically, and
aseptically “transmitted,” since, as the content of a neutral science,
it would already be aseptic. In this case, the educator would have
no reason, to say the least, to be concerned with being decent, or
to make an effort to be decent, to be ethical, except with regard to
his or her training and preparation. The subject or agent of a neutral
practice would have nothing to do but “transfer knowledge, ” a knowl-
edge that would be itself neutral.

' Actually, there is no such thing. There neither is, nor has ever |
been, an educational practice in zero space—time—neutral in the
sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intan- |
gible ideas. )To try to get people to believe that there is such a thing.
as this, al to convince or try to convince the incautious that this
is the truth, is indisputably a political practice, whereby an effort

78 + PAULO FREIRE

is made to soften any possible rebelliousness on the part of those
to whom injustice is being done. It is as political as the other prac-
tice, which does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own
political character.

What especially moves me to be ethical is to know that, inasmuch
as education of its very nature is directive and political, I must,
without ever denying my dream or my utopia before the educands,
respect them. To defend a thesis, a position, a preference, with
earnestness, defend it rigorously, but passionately, as well, and at
the same time to stimulate the contrary discourse, and respect the
right to utter that discourse, is the best way to teach, first, the right
to have our own ideas, even our duty to “quarrel” for them, for our
dreams—and not only to learn the syntax of the verb, haver; and
second, mutual respect)

Respecting the educands, however, does not mean lying to them
about my dreams, telling them in words or deeds or practices that
a school occupies a “sacred” space where one only studies, and
studying has nothing to do with what goes on in the world outside;
to hide my options from them, as if it were a “sin” to have a prefer-
ence, to make an option, to draw the line, to decide, to dream.
Respecting them means, on the one hand, testifying to them of my
choice, and defending it; and on the other, it means showing them
other options, whenever I teach—no matter what it is that I teach!

And\let it not be said that, if I am a biology teacher, I must not
“go off into other considerations —that I must only teach biology,
as if the phenomenon of life could be understood apart from its
historico-social, cultural, and political framework. \As if life, just life,
could be lived in the same way, in all of its dimensions, in a favela
(slum)* or cortigo (“beehive’—slum tenement building)™ as in a
prosperous area of Sao Paulos “Gardens’!* If I am a biology teacher,
obviously I must teach biology. But in doing so, I must not cut it
off from the framework of the whole.

The same reflection will be in order where literacy is concerned.
_ Anyone taking a literacy course for adults wants to learn to read and
write sentences, phrases, words. However, (the reading and writing
of words comes by way of the reading of the world-} Reading the
world is an antecedent act vis-a-vis the reading of the word.|The
teaching of the reading and writing of the word to a person missing

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PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 79

the critical exercise of reading and rereading the world is, scientifi-
cally, politically, and pedagogically crippled. |

Is there risk of influencing the students? It is impossible to live,
let alone exist, without risks. The important thing is to prepare
ourselves to be able to run them well.

K Educational practice, whether it be authoritarian or democratic,
is always directive. |

However, the moment the educator's “directivity” interferes with
the creative, formulative, investigative capacity of the educand, then
the necessary directivity is transformed into manipulation, into au-
thoritarianism} Manipulation and authoritarianism are practiced by |
many educators who, as they style themselves progressives, are actu-
ally taken for such.

My concern is not to deny the political and directive nature of
education—a denial that, for that matter, it would be impossible to
reduce to act—but to accept that this is its nature, and to live a life of
full consistency between my democratic option and my educational
practice, which is likewise democratic.

\My ethical duty, as one of the subjects, one of the agents, of a
practice that can never be neutral—the educational—is to express .
my respect for differences in ideas and positions. I must respect —
even positions opposed to my own, positions that I combat earnestly |
and with passion) AQROLTES s

To quibble that such bositidiis do not exist, is neither scientific
nor ethical.

To criticize the arrogance, the authoritarianism of intellectuals of
Left or Right, who are both basically reactionary in an identical
way—who judge themselves the proprietors of knowledge, the for-
mer, of revolutionary knowledge, the latter, of conservative knowl-
edge—to criticize the behavior of university people who claim to
be able to “conscientize” rural and urban workers without having to
be “conscientized” by them as well; to criticize an undisguisable air
of messianism, at bottom naive, on the part of intellectuals who, in
the name of the liberation of the working classes, impose or seek to
impose the “superiority” of their academic knowledge on the “rude
masses’—this I have always done. Of this I speak, and of almost
nothing else, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And of this I speak now, ,
with the same insistence, in Pedagogy of Hope.

80 - PAULO FREIRE

One of the substantial differences, however, between myself and
the authors of these criticisms of me is that, for me, the route to
the defeat of these practices is in the defeat of an authoritarian,
elitist ideology. (T he route to the defeat of these practices is in the
difficult exercise of the virtues of humility, of consistency, of toler-
ance, on the part of the progressive intellectual—in the exercise of
a consistency that ever decreases the distance between what we say
and what we dof

For them, the critics, the route to the defeat of these practices
is in the fantasy of a denial of the political nature of education, of
science, of technology.

Freire’s theory of learning, it was said, in effect, in the 1970s, is
subordinate to social and political purposes: and that kind of theory
is open to the risks of manipulation. As if an educational practice
were possible in which professors and students could be absolutely
exempt from the risk of manipulation and its consequences! As if
the existence of a distant, cold, indifferent educational practice when
it comes to “social and political purposes” were, or ever had been,
possible in any space-time!

What is ethically required of progressive educators is that, consis-
tent with their democratic dream, they respect the educands, and
therefore never.manipulate them

nae ee

Hence the watchfulness with which progressive educators ought
to act, the vigilance with which they ought to live their intense
educational practice: /Hence the need for them to keep their eyes
always open, along with their ears, and their whole soul—open to
the pitfalls of the so-called hidden curriculum, Hence the exigency
they must impose on themselves of growing ever more tolerant, of
waxing ever more open and forthright, of turning ever more critical,
of becoming ever more curious.)

The more tolerant, the more open and forthright, the more
critical, the more curious and humble they become, the more au-
thentically they will take up the practice of teaching. In a like per-
spective—indisputably progressive, much more postmodern, as I
_ understand postmodernity, than modern, let alone “modernizing’—
to teach is not the simple transmission of knowledge concerning the
object or concerning content. Teaching is not a simple transmission,
wrought by and large through a pure description of the concept of

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 8l

the object, to be memorized by students mechanically. Teaching—
again, from the postmodern progressive viewpoint of which I speak
here—is not reducible merely to teaching students to learn through
an operation in which the object of knowledge is the very act of
learning. Teaching someone to learn is only valid—from this view-
point, let me repeat-twhen educands learn to learn in learning the

reason-for, the “why,” of the object or the content.) It is by teaching

biology, or any other discipline, that the professor teaches the stu-
dents to learn.

In a progressive line, then, teaching implies that educands, by
“penetrating, as it were, the teacher's discourse, appropriate the
deeper meaning of the content being taught. The act of teaching,
experienced by the professor, is paralleled, on the part of the edu-
cands, by their act of knowing that which is taught.

For their part, teachers teach, in authentic terms, only to the
extent that they know the content they are teaching—that is, only
in the measure that they appropriate it, that they learn it, them-
selves. Here, in teaching, the teacher re-cognizes the object already
cognized, already known. In other words, she or he remakes her or
his cognizance in the cognizance of the educands/" Thus, teaching is
the form taken by the act of cognition that the teacher necessarily
performs in the quest to know what he or she is teaching in order

to call forth in the students their act of cognition as well! Therefore, ‘

teaching is a creative act, a critical act, and not a mechanical one.
The curiosity of the teacher and the students, in action, meet on
the basis of teaching-learning. }

(one teaching of a content by appropriating it, or the apprehension
of this content on the part of the educands, requires the creation
and exercise of a serious intellectual discipline, to be forged from

preschool onward.| To attempt or claim a critical insertion of edu- |

cands in an educational situation—which is a situation of cognition—
without that discipline, is a vain hope. But just as it is impossible
to teach learning without teaching a certain content through whose
knowledge one learns to learn, neither is the discipline of which I
am speaking taught but in and by the cognitive practice of which
the educands become the ever more critical subjects.

ws

CHAPTER

pline, for an identification of the act of studying, of learning,

of knowing, of teaching, with pure entertainment—learning

as a kind of toy or game, without rules or with lax ones. Nor again

st it be identified with insipid, uninteresting, boring busywork.

(The act of studying, teaching, learning, knowing, is difficult, and

especially, it is demanding, but it is pleasant}}as Georges Snyders

never omits to remind us. * It is crucial, then, that educands discover

and sense the joy that steeps it, that is part of it, and that is ever
ready to fill the hearts of all who surrender to it.

The testimonial role of teachers in the birthing of this discipline
is enormous. But once it is at hand, their authority, of which their
competence is a part, discharges an important function.{ Teachers
who fail to take their teaching practice seriously, who therefore do
not study, so that they teach poorly, or who teach something they
know poorly, who do not fight to have the material conditions abso-
lutely necessary for their teaching practice, deprive themselves of
the wherewithal to cooperate in the formation of the indispensable
intellectual discipline of the students. Thus, they disqualify them-
selves as teachers.

On the other hand, this discipline cannot emerge from a labor
accomplished in the students by the teacher; While requiring the

\

(, there is no room, in the constitution of this needed disci-

*Georges Snyders, La joie a l'école (Paris: PUF, 1986).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 83

effective presence of the teacher—his or her orientation, stimulus,
authority—that discipline must be built and adopted by the stu-
dents. |

I feel led to repeat, by way of emphasizing my position, that a
democratic practice consistent with my democratic discourse, which
speaks of my democratic option, does not impose on me a silence
as to my dreams, (nor does the necessary criticism of what Amilcar
Cabral* styles “the negativities of culture” make me an “elitist in-
vader’ of the popular culture. Criticism, and the effort to overcome
these “negativities,” are not only to be recammended, they are in-
dispensable. Basically, this has to do with /the passage of knowledge
from the level of the “knowledge of living experience,” of common
sense, to the knowledge emerging from more rigorous procedures
of approach to knowable objects. And to make this shift belongs to
the} popular classes by right. /Hénce, in the name of respect for the
culture of the peasants, for example, not to enable them to go beyond
their beliefs regarding self-in-the-world and_self-with-the-world_ be-
itist ideology) It is as if revealing the raison
étre, the why, of things, and to have a complete knowledge of
things, were or ought to be the privilege of the elite. Suffice it
for the popular classes to be sani say, “I think its ...” about
the world. \

What is impermissible—I repeat myself, now—is disrespect for
the knowledge of common sense. What is impermissible is the at-
tempt ranscend it without starting with it and proceeding by

of it.

To challenge educands with regard to their certitudes is a duty
of the progressive educator) What kind of educator would I be if I
did not feel moved by a powerful impulse to seek, without lying,
convincing arguments in defense of the dreams for which I struggle,
‘in defense of the “why” of the hope with which I act as an educator?

(What is not permissible to be doing is to conceal truths, deny
information, impose principles, eviscerate the educands of their
freedom, or punish them, no matter by what method, if, for various
reasons, they fail to accept my discourse—reject my utopia.) This

*Amilcar Cabral, Obras escolhidas, vol. 1, A arma da teoria—unidade e luta
(Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1976), p. 141.

84 - PAULO FREIRE

would indeed mean I am falling into inconsistency, into the destruc-
tive sectarianism that I once upon a time severely criticized in Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed and that I criticize today, in revisiting it, in
Pedagogy of Hope.

These considerations bring me to another point, one directly con-
nected with them, in regard to which I have likewise had to listen
to “corrections” that, it seems to me, themselves stand in need of
correction. I refer to the insistence with which, for such a long time
now, I have argued the need we progressive educators have never
to underestimate or reject knowledge had from living experience,
with which educands come to school or to informal centers of educa-
tion.|Obviously there are differences in the way one must deal with
this kind of knowledge, if it is a question of one or other of the cases
cited above. In each of them, however, {to underestimate the wisdom
that necessarily results from sociocultural experience, is at one and
the same time a scientific error, and the unequivocal expression of
_the presence of an elitist ideology.\It may even be the hidden, con-
cealed, ideological foundation that, on the one hand, blinds a per-
son to objective reality, and on the other, encourages the nearsight-
edness of those who reject popular knowledge as having led them
into scientific error. In the last analysis, it is this “myopia” that, once
it becomes an ideological obstacle, occasions epistemological error.

There have been various kinds of negative understanding, and
therefore criticism, of this defense of popular knowledge, with which
I have been engaged for so long{The mythification of popular knowl-
edge, its superexaltation, is as open to challenge as is its rejection.
As the latter is elitist, so the former is “basist.”"/

Still, both basism and elitism, so sectarian in themselves, when
taken at and in their truth become capable of transcending them-
selves.

One of these ways of criticizing the defense that I have been
mounting of the knowledge acquired from living experience, criti-
cisms not infrequently repeated today, to my legitimate astonish-
ment and dismay, is that which suggests or asserts, basically, that I
propose that the educator ought to stay spinning in an orbit, along
with the educands, around their commonsense knowledge, without
any attempt to get beyond that knowledge. And the criticism of this
tenor concludes triumphantly by emphasizing the obvious failure of

cee v

. big 2

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 85

this naive understanding. And it is attributed to me—this defense

of a tireless circling around commonsense knowledge. .

But I have never actually asserted, or so much as insinuated,
“innocence’ of such proportions.

What I have said and resaid, untiringly, is that/ “ve must not by-
pass—spurning it as “good for nothing’—that which educands, be
they children coming to school for the first time, or young people
and adults at centers of popular education, bring with them in the
way of an understanding of the world, in the most varied dimensions
of their own practice in the social practice of which they are a part. }
Their speech, their way of counting and calculating, their ideas
about the so-called other world, their religiousness, their knowledge
about health, the body, sexuality, life, death, the power of the saints, 3
magic spells, must all be attaceatt i

Indeed, this is a basic theme of ethnoscience® today: how to avoid
a dichotomy between the knowledges, the popular and the erudite,
or how to understand and experience the dialectic between what
Snyders* calls “primary culture” and “developed culture.”

A respect for both knowledges—a respect of which I speak so
much—with a view to getting beyond them, must never mean, in a
serious, radical, and therefore critical, never sectarian, rigorous,
careful, competent reading of my texts, that the educator must stick
with the knowledge of living experience.

With progressive education, respect for the knowledge of living
experience is inserted into the larger horizon against which it is
generated—the horizon of cultural context, which cannot be under-
stood apart from its class particularities, and this indeed in societies
so complex that the characterization of those particularities is less

to come by.

(Respect for popular knowledge, then, necessarily implies respect_
for cultural context, \Educands concrete localization is the point of “ UM
departure for the knowledge they create of the world/S"Their” world, ©
in the last analysis, is the primary and inescapable face of theZ Gon
world itself. Lene

My concerns with the respect due the local world of the educands °,
continue, from time to time—to my dismay, again—to generate

*Snyders, La joie a Uécole.

86 - PAULO FREIRE

criticisms that see me adrift, caught with no means of escape in the
blind alley of the narrow horizons of localization. Once more, these
criticisms are the upshot of a poor reading of me—or of the reading
of texts written about my work by someone who likewise has read
me poorly, incompetently, or who has not read me.

I should deserve not only these criticisms, but far more telling
ones, as well, if, instead of defending educands local context as the
point of departure for a prolongation of their understanding of the
world, I were to defend a “focalistic” position: a position in which,
oblivious of the dialectical nature of reality, I should fail to perceive
the contradictory relations between partialities and the totality. I
would thus have fallen into the error we have seen criticized at a
certain moment of this text by peasants in the figure of the relation-
ship they cited between salt, as a part, as one of the ingredients, of
seasoning, and the latter as a totality.

This has never been what I have done or proposed, at any time
during my practice as an educator—the practice that has furnished
me the further undertaking of thinking upon my educational prac-
tice, from which latter habit of reflection, in turn, has emerged all
that I have ever written, down to this very day.

(fo me, it becomes difficult, indeed impossible, to understand

e interpretation of my respect for the local—the local or the re-
gional—as a rejection of the universal. For example, I do not
understand how, in so rightly criticizing positions that “stifle” or
“suppress the totality implicit in locality—which suppression I call
“focalism’—some give as an example of that suppression the cate-
gory of “universal minimal vocabulary” that I use in my general
concept of literacy training.

The “universal minimal vocabulary,” of course, emerges from an
investigation that has to be conducted, and it is on the basis of this
vocabulary that we set up our literacy programs. Never, however,
have I said that these programs to be developed on the basis of this
universal vocabulary ought to remain absolutely bound up with local
reality. If I had said that, I should not have the understanding of
language that I have, which is manifest not only in earlier works,
but in the present essay as well. In fact, I should be incapable of a
dialectical manner of thinking.

Without a great deal of commentary, I refer the reader to any

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 87%

edition of Educagdo como pratica da liberdade. 1 am thinking of the
last part of the book, in which I execute an analysis of seventeen
selected words among those that have created the “universal vocabu-
lary’ on the basis of research conducted in the State of Rio de
Janeiro, and applied as well in Guanabara, as Rio was then called.*’
A mere reading of these pages, it seems to me, explains the error
of such a criticism.

I believe that it is fundamental to have made clear to educands,
or to keep making clear, this obvious fact: the regional emerges
from the local just as the national arises from the regional, and
the continental from the national as the worldwide emerges from _
the continental,” on

Just as it isa mistake to get stuck in the local, losing our vision

f the whole, so also it is a mistake to waft above the whole, renounc-/
any reference to the local whence the whole has emerged:-—~

Back in Brazil on a visit in 1979, I declared in an interview that
my Recifeness explained my Pernambucanity, that the latter clari-
fied my Northeastness, which in turn shed light on my Brazilianity,
my Brazilianity elucidated my Latin Americanness, and the latter
made me a person of the world.

Ariano Suassuna became a universal writer from a point of depar-
ture not in the universe, but in Taperua.*

“A critical analysis on the part of popular groups of their way of
being in the world of the most immediate everyday, that of their
particular customary world,” I myself say in Pedagogy in Process:
The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (1977/1978), page 59, “and the percep-
tion of the why of the facts given in it, lead us to transcend the
narrow horizons of the neighborhood or even the immediate geo-
graphical area, to gain that global view of reality indispensable for
an understanding of the task of national reconstruction itself.”

But let us go back a way, to my first book, Educagdo como pratica
da liberdade, completed in 1965 and published in 1967. On page
114, in a comment on the process of the creation of codifications,

I say:

These situations function as challenges to groups. They are codi-
fied problem situations, secreting elements that will be decoded
by groups with the cooperation of the coordinator. A discussion

88 - PAULO FREIRE
of them, like that of those we have from the anthropological
concept of culture, will lead groups to conscientizagao, and, con-
comitantly, literacy.
It is local situations [emphasis in the original], however, that
open perspectives for an analysis of national (and regional)
problems.

“The written word,” Plato said, “cannot be defended when mis-
understood. ’*

I cannot accept responsibility, I must say, for what is said or done
in my name contrary to what I do and say. It is of no avail, to make
the furious assertion, as someone once did: “You may not have said
this, but people who say theyre your disciples did.” Without claim-
ing, by a long shot, to compare myself to Marx (not because now,
from time to time, it is said that he is a “has-been,” but on the
contrary, precisely because, to me, he continues to be, needing only
to be reseen), I find myself inclined to quote one of his letters—
the one in which, irritated by inconsistent French “Marxists,” he
said: “Well, then, all I know is that 'm no Marxist.’ +

And as long as I have mentioned Marx, let me take the opportu-
nity to comment on certain self-styled “Marxist” criticisms of me in
the 1970s. Some of them—as, unfortunately, not infrequently oc-
curs—failed to take into consideration two fundamental points: (1)
that I had not died; (2) that I had not yet written Pedagogy of
the Oppressed—which had years to wait—but only Educacdo como
pratica da liberdade. Hence the illegitimacy of their extension to a
whole body of thought a criticism of one moment of that thought.
Certain criticisms may be valid for one or another text, but without
foundation if extended to the totality of my work.

One of these criticisms—apparently, at least, more formal, mecha-
nistic, than dialectical—expressed amazement that I had made no
reference to social classes—especially, that I had not asserted that
“it is the class struggle that moves history.” My critics were sur-

*Paul Shorey, What Plato Said: A Résume and Analysis of Plato's Writings with
Synopses and Critical Comment, limited ed. (Chicago: Phoenix Books/University
of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 158.

t“Carta de Engels a Schmidt—Londres, 5.8.188,” in Karl Marx, Obras Escogi-
das (Moscow: Progresso), 2:491.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 89

prised that, instead of social classes, I had worked with the “vague
concept of the oppressed.”

In the first place, it is inconceivable to me that employers and
workers, rural or urban, could read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and
then conclude, the former, that they were laborers, and the latter,
that they were employers. And this because the vagueness of the
concept of the oppressed had left them so confused and indecisive
that employers hesitated as to whether they should or should not
continue to enjoy the usufruct of their “surplus value” and the work-
ers as to their right to strike as a fundamental tool in the defense
of their interests!

I now recall something I read in 1981, shortly after my return
from exile, written by a young worker of Sao Paulo in which she_
asked—answering her own question:| “Who are the people? Those
who don't ask who the people are/’} \asuf cies

However, the first time I read One of these criticisms, I sat down
for several hours and reread my book, counting the times when,
throughout, I had spoken of social classes. Not infrequently, on the
same page, I had spoken of social classes two or three times. Only,
I had spoken of social classes not as a cliché, or in fear of a possible
inspector or ideological censor who might be spying on me and
would possibly even call me to account. The authors of such criti-
cisms, generally speaking, although they do not always make this
explicit, are in the main uncomfortable with certain particular
points, such as: the vagueness of the concept of the oppressed, which
I have already mentioned, or of the people; the assertion I make
in the book that the oppressed, in gaining liberation, liberate the
oppressor; not to have declared, as I have already indicated, that
the class struggle is the impulse of history; ithe treatment I accorded
the individual, refusing to reduce him or her to a pure reflex of
socioeconomic structures;/the treatment I accorded awareness and
consciousness, the importance of subjectivity; the role of “consci-
entization” or consciousness-raising that, in Pedagogy of the Op-
pressed, transcends, in terms of criticalness, that attributed to it in
Educacdo como pratica da liberdade; the assertion that the “adhe-
sion” to reality in which the great peasant masses of Latin America
find themselves dictates that the consciousness of oppressed class

90 - PAULO FREIRE

must pass, if not antecedently, then at least concomitantly, by way
of the awareness of oppressed person.

Never were all of these points raised at the same time. Rather,
one or other of them was brought up in criticisms either written, or
verbal (in seminars and discussions), in Europe, the United States,
Australia, Latin America.

Yesterday as today, I spoke of social classes with the same indepen-
dence and consciousness of being right. It may even be, however,
that many of those who demanded of me in the 1970s that I con-
stantly explicate the concept, today require the very opposite: that
I retract the two dozen times I employed it, because “there are no
longer any social classes, nor therefore any class conflict.” Hence
the fact that these critics now prefer, to the language of the possible,
which holds fast to utopia as a possible dream, the neoliberal, “prag-
matic’ discourse, according to which we must “accommodate” to the
facts as given—as if they could be given in no other way, as if we
had no duty to fight, precisely because we are persons, to have them
given differently.

ai have never labored under the misapprehension that social classes
and the struggle between them could explain everything, right
down to the color of the sky on a Tuesday evening? And so I have
never said that the class struggle, in the modern world, has been or
is “the mover of history.” On the other hand, still today, and possibly
for a long time to come, it is impossible to understand history with-
out social classes, without their interests in collision.

The class struggle is not the mover of history, but is certainly one
of them. —- Acker ledacac tet Codon y

As someone dissatisfied with the world of injustice that is here—
someone to whom the “pragmatic” discourse recommends I simply
adapt—I must, surely, today, just as I did yesterday, be alert to the
relationship between tactics and strategy. It is one thing to call on
activists who keep on striving for a world less ugly, to attend to
the need that, first, their tactics not contradict their strategy, their
objectives, their dream; second, that their tactics, qua route to the
realization of the strategic dream, be, be done, be realized, in con-
crete history, and therefore that they change; and it is another thing
simply to say that all you have to do is dream(_ Dreaming is not only
a necessary political act, it is an integral oe of the historico-social

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - Ql

manner of being a person. It is part of human nature, which, within
history, is in permanent process of becoming. }
7 In our making and remaking of ourselves in the process of making
istory—as subjects and objects, persons, becoming beings of inser-
tion in the world and not of pure adaptation to the world—we should
end by having the dream, too, a mover of history. There is no change
without dream, as there is no dream without hope. /
hus, I keep insisting, ever since Pedagogy of the Oppressed:., ,
fier is no authentic utopia apart from the tension between the)
nunciation of a present becoming more and more intolerable, and
the “annunciation,” announcement, of a future to be created, built— , Yu) ft,
politically, esthetically, and ethically—by us women and men/ Uto- , Keo,
pia implies this denunciation and proclamation, but it does not per-
mit the tension between the two.to die away with the production of
_ the future previously announced!) Now the erstwhile future is a new |
‘present, and a new dream experience is forged. History does not

~ \“ become immobilized, does not die. On the contrary, it goes on.

The understanding of history as opportunity and not determin- ~
ism, the conception of history operative in this book, would be unin-
telligible without the dream, just as the deterministic conception
feels uncomfortable, in its incompatibility with this understanding
and therefore denies it.

Thus it comes about that, in the former conception the historical
role of subjectivity is relevant, while in the latter it is minimized or
denied. Hence, in the first, education, while not regarded as able
to accomplish all things, is acknowledged as important, since it can
do something; while in the second it is belittled.

(Indeed, es mec ae eccerren ee
whether this be as the pure, mechanical repetition of the present,
or simply because it “is what it has to be’—there is no room for
utopia, nor therefore for the dream, the option, the decision, or
expectancy in the struggle, which is the only way hope exists. There
is no room for education. Only for training.)

As project, as design for a different, less-ugly “world,” the dream
is as necessary to political subjects, transformers of the world and
not adapters to it, aa—may I be permitted the repetition—it is fun-
damental for an artisan, who projects in her or his brain what she
or he is going to execute even before the execution thereof.

92 - PAULO FREIRE

(This is why, from the viewpoint of dominant class interests, the
Ae the dominated dream the dream of which I speak, in the confi-
dent way of which I speak, and the less they. practice the political
apprenticeship of committing themselves to a utopia, the more open
they will become to “pragmatic” discourses, and the sounder the
dominant classes will sleep.

The modernity of some of the sectors of the dominant classes,
whose position is very far advanced over the posture of the old,
retrograde leadership of the “captains of industry of yesteryear,
cannot, nopsyes change its spots. It remains a class position.

And yet\this does not mean, to my view, that the working classes
ought to close themselves off, in sectarian fashion, from the broaden-
ing of democratic spaces that can result from a new _kind of relation-
ship between themselves and the dominant classes. |The important
thing is that the working classes continue to learn, in the very prac-
tice of their struggle, to set limits to their concessions—in other
words, that they teach the dominant classes the limits within which
they themselves may move. }

Finally, relationships between classes are a political fact, which
generates a class knowledge, and that class knowledge has the most
urgent need of lucidity and discernment when choosing the best
tactics to be used. Those tactics vary in concrete history, but must
be in consonance with strategic objectives.

This is surely not learned in special courses. It is learned and
taught precisely at the historical moment at which necessity imposes
on social classes the necessary quest for a better relationship be-
tween them in dealing with their antagonistic interests. At such
historical moments, such as the one in which we are living today,
in our country and abroad, it is reality itself that cries out, warning
social classes of the urgency of new forms of encounter for the secur-
ing of solutions that cannot wait for tomorrow. The practice of setting
up these new encounters, or the history of this practice, this at-
tempt, can be studied by labor leaders, not only in courses of the
history of workers struggles, but also in practical theory courses,
later, of training for labor leaders. This is what we are experiencing
today, in the maelstrom of the fearful crisis we are fighting, in which
there have been high moments in discussions between dominant
and laboring classes. Hence, however, to say that we are living an-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 93

other history now, a new history in which social classes are disap-
pearing and their conflicts along with them; to say that socialism
lies pulverized in the rubble of the Berlin Wall, is something in
which I, for my part, do not believe.

The neoliberal discourses, with all their talk of “modernity,” do
not have the social classes and decree the

nonexistence of antagonistic interests between them, nor Romo! they
have the DOREY de omay sith the coniets and arcaslo between
them. Any appearances to the contrary are to be explained by the
fact that struggle is a historical category, and therefore has historic-
ity. It changes from space-time to space-time. Struggle does not
rule out the possibility of pacts and understandings, of adjustments
between parties in discord. Pacts and understandings are them-
selves part of the struggle.

There are historical moments at which the survival of the social
whole imposes on the classes a need to understand one another—
which does not mean, let us repeat, experiencing a new historical
time devoid of social classes and their conflicts. A new historical
time, yes, but a time in which the social classes continue to exist
and to fight for their respective interests.

Instead of simple “pragmatic” accommodation, labor leaders are
under the necessity of creating certain qualities or virtues without
which, more and more, it is becoming difficult for them to strive
for their rights.

The assertion that an “ideological discourse” is a kind of natural
clumsiness on the part of the Left, which insists on holding one
when there are no ideologies anymore, and when, it is said, no one
any longer wishes to hear an ideological discourse, is itself a cunning
ideological discourse on the part of the dominant classes. What we
have gotten over is not the ideological discourse, but the “fanatical,”
or inconsistent, discourse, which merely repeats clichés that never
should have been pronounced in the first place. What is becoming
less and less viable, fortunately, is verbal incontinence—discourse
that loses itself in a tiresome rhetoric bereft of so much as sonority |
and rhythm. a

Any progressive, who, all afire, insists on this practice—at times
in a tremulous voice—will be contributing little or nothing to the

94 - PAULO FREIRE

political advance of which we have need. But, then, to up and pro-
claim the era of the “neutral discourse’? Hardly.
I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of
“realistic socialism” does not mean, on one side, that socialism has
~ shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism
has now stepped forward in its excellence once and for all.
What excellence is this, that manages to “coexist with more than
a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty, *
not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with
which it coexists with “pockets of poverty’ and misery in its own,
developed body. What excellence is this, that sleeps in peace while
numberless men and women make their home in the street, and
says it is their own fault that they are on the street? What excellence
is this, that struggles so little, if it struggles at all, with discrimina-
tion for reason of sex, class, or race, as if to reject someone different,
humiliate her, offend him, hold her in contempt, exploit her, were
the right of individuals, or classes, or races, or one sex, that holds a
position of power over another? What excellence is this, that tepidly
registers the millions of children who come into the world and do
not remain, or not for long, or if they are more resistant, manage
; to stay a while, then take their leave of the world?

Some 30 million children under five years of age die every year
of causes that would not normally be fatal in developed countries.
Some 110 million children throughout the world (almost 20 per-
cent of the age group) fail to complete their primary education.
More than 90 percent of these children live in low and medium-
low income countries. +

On the other hand, UNICEF states:

If current tendencies are maintained, more than 100 million
children will die of disease and malnutrition in the decade of
the 1990s. The causes of these deaths can be counted on one’s
fingers. Nearly all will die of diseases that were rather fami-

*See Relatério sobre 0 Desenvolvimento Mundial, 1990, published for World
Bank by Fundacdo Getitlio Vargas.
tWorld Development Report, 1990, p. 76.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 95

liar in other times in the industrialized nations. They will die
parched with dehydration, suffocated by pneumonia, infected
with tetanus or measles, or suffocated by whooping cough. These
five very common diseases, all relatively easy and inexpensive
to prevent or treat, will be responsible for more than two-thirds
of infant deaths, and more than half of all infantile malnutrition,
in the next decade.

The UNICEF report goes on to say:

To put the problem in a global perspective: The additional costs,
including a program to avoid the great majority of the deaths
and infantile undernourishment in the coming years, ought to
reach approximately 2.5 billion dollars a year by the end of the
1990s—about the same amount of money as American compa-
nies spend annually for cigarette advertising. *

Simply astounding.

What excellence is this, that, in the Brazilian Northeast, coexists
with a degree of misery that could only have been thought a piece
of fiction: little boys and girls, women and men, vying with starving
pups, tragically, like animals, for the garbage of the great trash heaps
outlying the cities, to eat? Nor is Sao Paulo itself exempt from the
experience of this wretchedness.

What excellence is this, that seems blind to little children with
distended bellies, eaten up by worms, toothless women looking like
old crones at thirty, wasted men, skinny, stooped populations? Fifty-
two percent of the population of Recife live in slums, in bad weather,
an easy prey for diseases that effortlessly crush their enfeebled bod-
ies. What excellence is this, that strikes a pact with the cold-
blooded, cowardly murder of landless men and women of the coun-
tryside simply because they fight for their right to their word and
their labor, while they remain bound to the land and despoiled of
their fields by the dominant classes?

What excellence is this, that gazes with serene regard upon the
extermination of little girls and boys in the great Brazilian urban

*UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), Situagéo mundial da infancia,
1990, p. 16.

96 - PAULO FREIRE

centers—that “forbids” 8 million children of the popular classes to
go to school, that “expels” from the schools a great number of those
who manage to get in—and that calls all this “capitalistic modernity. ”

To me, on the contrary, the element of failure in the experience
of “realistic socialism,” by and large, was not its soci am, but
“its authoritarian mold—which contradicted it, and of aan Marx
and Lenin are also guilty, and not just Stalin—just as what is positive
in the capitalist experience has never been the capitalist system,
but its democratic mold.

In this sense, as well, the crumbling away of the authoritarian
socialist world—which, in many aspects, is a kind of ode to freedom,
and which leaves so many minds, previously calm and contained,
stupefied, thunderstruck, disconcerted, lost—offers us the extraor-
dinary, if challenging, opportunity to continue dreaming and
fighting for the socialist dream, purified of its authoritarian_distor-
tions, its totalitarian repulsiveness, its sectarian blindness//T his is
why I personally look forward to a time when it will become even
easier to wage the democratic struggle against the wickedness of
capitalism) What is becoming needful, among other things, is that
Marxists get over their smug certainty that they are modern, adopt
an attitude of humility in dealing with the popular classes, and be-
come postmodernly less smug and less certain—progressively post-
modern.

Let us briefly turn to other points already mentioned.

Inasmuch as the violence of the oppressors makes of the op-
pressed persons forbidden to be, the response of the latter to
the violence of the former is found infused with a yearning to

f Oppressors, wreaking violence upon others, and forbidding
them to be, are likewise unable to be. In withdrawing from them
| the power to oppress and crush, the oppressed, struggling to be,
restore to them the humanity lost in the use of oppression.
This is why only the oppressed, by achieving their liberation,
can liberate the oppressors. The latter, as oppressing class [em-
phasis in the original], can neither liberate nor be liberated. *

The first observation I might make on the quotation from these

*Paulo Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido, p.43.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 97

pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed is that these pages are among
those in which I make it very clear of whom I am speaking when I
speak of oppressor and oppressed.

Ultimately, or perhaps I might say, in the overall context, not only
of the passage cited, but of the whole book (could it have been
otherwise?), a particular anthropology is implicit (when not clear
and explicit)—a certain understanding or view of human beings as
managing their nature in their own history, of which they become
necessarily both subject and object. This is precisely one of the
connotations of that nature, constituted socially and historically,
which not only founds the assertion made in the passage quoted,
but in which are rooted, consistently, I feel confident, the positions
on political pedagogy that I have argued over the course of the years. _

/ I cannot understand human beings as simply living. I can under-
stand them only as historically, culturally, and socially existing. I can
understand them only as beings who are makers of their “way,” in
the making of which they lay themselves open to or commit them-
selves to the “way” that they make and that therefore remakes them , |
as welll

Unlike the other animals, which do not become able to transform
life into existence, we, as existent, outfit ourselves to engage in the
struggle in quest of and in defense of equality of opportunity, by
the very fact that, as living beings, we are radically different from
one another.

We are all different, and the manner in which living beings

reproduce is programmed for what we are to be. This is why the

human being eventually has need of fashioning the concept of

equality. Were we all identical, like a population of bacteria, the
otion of equality would be pertectly useless

(The great leap that we learn to take has been to work not precisely
on the innate, nor only on the acquired, but on the relationship
between the two.

“The fashioning of an individual,” says Francois Jacob, in the same
passage, “from the physical, intellectual, moral viewpoint, corre-

*Francois Jacob, “Nous sommes programmes, mais pour apprendre,” Le Cour-
rier (UNESCO, February 1991).

98 - PAULO FREIRE

sponds to an ongoing interaction between the innate and the ac-
quired.”

We become capable of imaginatively, curiously, “stepping back”
from ourselves—from the life we lead—and of disposing ourselves
to “know about it.” The moment came when we not only lived, but
began to know that we were living—hence it was possible for us to
know that we know, and therefore to know that we could do more.
What we cannot do, as imaginative, curious beings, is to cease to
learn and to seek, to investigate the “why” of things. We cannot
exist without wondering about tomorrow, about what is “going on, ”
and going on in favor of what, against what, for whom, against whom.
We cannot exist without wondering about how to do the concrete
or “untested feasible” that requires us to fight for it.

Why? Because this is the being we are “programmed,” but not
determined, to be. “None of the programs, indeed, is completely
rigid. Each defines the structures, which are only potentialities,
probabilities, tendencies. Genes determine only the constitution of
the individual,” so that “hereditary structures and the learning pro-
cess are found to be strictly interconnected. *

It is because we are this being—a being of ongoing, curious
search, which “steps back” from itself and from the life it leads—it
is because we are this being, given to adventure and the “passion
to know,” for which that freedom becomes indispensable that, consti-
tuted in the very struggle for itself, is possible only because, though
we are “programmed, we are nevertheless not determined./ It is
because this is “the way we are” that we live the life of a vocation,
a calling, to humanization, and that in dehumanization, which is a
concrete fact in history, we live the life of a distortion of the call—
never another calling. Neither one, humanization or dehumaniza-
tion, is sure destiny, given datum, lot, or fate. This is precisely why
the one is calling, and the other, distortion of the calling.

It is important to emphasize that, in speaking of “being more,”
or of humanization as ontological vocation of the human being, I am
not falling into any fundamentalistic position—which, incidentally,
is always conservative. Hence my equally heavy emphasis on the
fact that this “vocation,” this calling, rather than being anything a

*Jacob, “Nous sommes programmes.”

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 99

priori in history, on the contrary is something constituted in history.
On the other hand, the striving for it, and the means of accomplish-
ing it—which are also historical, besides varying from space-time to
space—time—require, indisputably, the adoption of a utopia. Utopia,
however, would not be possible if it lacked the taste for freedom
that permeates the vocation to humanization. Or if it lacked hope,
without which we do not struggle.

if he dream of humanization, whose concretization is always a
process, and always a becoming, passes by way of breach with the
real, concrete economic, political, social, ideological, and so on, or-
der, moorings that are condemning us to dehumanization./Thus the
dream is a demand or condition that becomes ongoing in the history
that we make and that makes and remakes us.

Not being an a priori of history, human nature, which on the
contrary is constituted in history, has one of its implications in the
vocation or calling to which we have referred.

This is why the oppressor is dehumanized in dehumanizing the”
oppressed. No matter that the oppressor eat well, be well regarded,
or sleep well. It would be impossible to dehumanize without being
dehumanized—so deep are the social roots of the calling //1 am not,
I do not be, unless you are, unless you be. Above all, I am not if I
forbid you to be. -

[This is why, as an individual and as a class, the oppressor can
neither liberate nor be liberated) This is why, through self-libera-
tion, in and through the needed, just struggle, the oppressed, as an
individual and as a class, liberates the oppressor, by the simple fact
of forbidding him or her to keep on oppressing.

However, liberation and oppression are not inextricably in-
termeshed in history. Just so, human nature, as it generates itself
in history, does not contain, as part and parcel of itself, being more,
does not contain humanization, except as the vocation whose con-
trary is distortion in history.

The political practice based on a mechanistic and deterministic
conception of history will never contribute to the lessening of the
risks of men and women’s dehumanization.

Throughout history, we men and women become special animals
indeed, then. We invent the opportunity of setting ourselves free to
the extent that we become able to perceive as unconcluded, limited,

100 - PAULO FREIRE

conditioned, historical beings. Especially, we invent the opportunity
of setting ourselves free by perceiving, as well, that the sheer per-
ception of inconclusion, limitation, opportunity, is not enough. To
the perception must be joined the political struggle for the transfor-
mation of the world. The liberation of individuals acquires profound
meaning only when the transformation of society is achieved.

The dream becomes a need, a necessity. }/

And, on this subject, another point that has generated criticism
has been precisely the role I ascribe, and continue to ascribe, to
subjectivity in the process of the transformation of reality, or to the
relationship between undichotomizable subjectivity and objectivity,
between awareness and the world.

Beginning with the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, not
infrequent have been the times I have written or spoken of this
matter, sometimes in interviews, sometimes in periodicals, some-
times in essays, in seminars. It will do no harm, however, to take
up the matter again now and discuss it anew, at least briefly.

In fact, I have no doubt that this subject, which is always present
in philosophical reflection, is not only still a current one, but a
crucial one, as well, as the century closes. It continues to be an
object of philosophical reflection, which reflection is necessarily ex-
tended to the fields of epistemology, politics, ideology, language,
pedagogy, and modern physics.

e have to recognize, in a first approach to the subject, how
difficult it is for us to “walk the streets of history’—regardless of
whether we “step back” from practice in order to theorize it, or are
engaged in it-++succumbing to the temptation either to overestimate
our objectivity and reduce consciousness to it, or to discern or
understand consciousness as the almighty maker and arbitrary re-
maker of the world.

Subjectivism or mechanistic objectivism are both antidilectical,
and thereby incapable of apprehending the permanent tension be-
tween consciousness and the world.

It is only in a dialectical perspective that we can grasp the role
of consciousness in history, disentangled from any distortion that
either exaggerates its importance or cancels, rejects it.

Thus, the dialectical view indicates to us the importance of re-
jecting as false, for example, a comprehension of awareness as pure

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE «- l1O0l

reflex of material objectivity, but at the same time the importance
of rejecting an understanding of awareness that would confer upon
it a determining power over concrete reality.

In like fashion, the dialectical view indicates to us the incompati-
bility between it and an inevitable tomorrow, an idea that I have
criticized before, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and that I now
criticize in this essay. The dialectical view is incompatible with the
notion that tomorrow is the pure repetition of today, or that tomor-
row is something “predated,” or as I have called it, a given datum,
a “given given.” This “tamed” or domesticated view of the future,
shared by reactionaries and “revolutionaries” alike—naturally, each
in their own way—posits, in the mind of the former, the future as a
repetition of the present (which of course must undergo “adverbial”
changes), and in the mind of the second, the future as “inexorable
progress.”* Both of these views or visions imply a fatalistic “intelli-
gence’ (in the sense of an interpretative “understanding,” an “inner
reading’) of history in which there is no room for authentic hope.

The idea of the inexorability of a history that will necessarily
come in a predetermined manner constitutes what I call “liberation
fatalism” or “fatalistic liberation’—a liberation to come as a kind of
gift or donation of history: the liberation that will come because it
has been said that it will come.

‘In the dialectical perception, the future of which we dream is not
inexorable. We have to make it, produce it, else it will not come in
the form that we would more or less wish it to, True, of course, we
have to make it not arbitrarialy, but with the materials, with the
concrete reality, of which we dispose, and more as a project, a dream,
for which we struggle.

While for dogmatic, mechanistic positions, the consciousness that
I call critical takes shape as a kind of epiphenomenon, a ‘spin-off’ —
an automatic, mechanical result of structural changes—Cfor dialectic,
the importance of consciousness is in the fact that, not being the
maker of reality, neither is it, at the opposite pole, a pure reflex of
reality. It is precisely on this point that something of basic impor-
tance turns—the basic importance of education §s act of cognition

*Erica Sherover Marcuse, Emancipation and Consciousness: Dogmatic and Dia-
lectical Perspectives in the Early Marx (New York: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986).

102 - PAULO FREIRE

not only of the content, but of the “why” of economic, social, politi-
cal, ideological, and historical facts, which explain the greater or
lesser degree of “interdict of the body,”*’ our conscious body, under
which we find ourselves placed.

In the 1950s, perhaps more by way of an intuition of the phe-
nomenon than as a critical understanding of the same, at which
understanding I was then arriving, I asserted, in the university dis-
sertation to which I have referred in this book, and I repeated later
in Educacéo como pratica da liberdade, that, while the advance
from what I called “semi-intransitive awareness’ to “transitive-naive
awareness is automatically at hand, on the strength of infrastruc-
tural transformations, the more important passage—that from “naive
transitivity’ to “critical transitivity —comes only through serious
educational efforts bent to this end.*

To be sure, my experiences with SESI, with which I coupled
memories of my childhood and adolescence in Jabotéo, helped me
to understand, even before my theoretical readings on the subject,
the relations prevailing between awareness and world as tending to
be dynamic, never mechanistic. I could not avoid, of course, the
risks to which I have referred—those of mechanism and of idealistic
subjectivism—in discussing those relations, and I acknowledge my
slips in the direction of an overemphasis on awareness.

In 1974, in Geneva, Ivan Illich and I presided at a conference
under the patronage of the Department of Education of the World
Council of Churches, in which we took up once more the concepts
of “descholarization’” (Illich) and conscientizagdo (I). I wrote a little
document for the conference, from which I am now going to quote
an extended passage instead of simply referring the reader to it. (It
originally appeared in the WCC periodical RISK, in 1975).+

. . . Although there can be no consciousness-raising (conscienti-
za¢ao) without the unveiling, the revelation, of objective reality
as the object of the cognition of the subjects involved in process

*Paulo Freire, Educagao como prédtica da liberdade (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e
Terra, 1969).

tIn Brazil, it appears in Agdo cultural para a liberdade e outros escritos (Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1976). In the United States, it appears under the title, The
Politics of Education (Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1986).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 103

of consciousness-raising, nevertheless that revelation—even
granting that a new perception flow from the fact of a reality
laying itself bare—is not yet enough to render the consciousness-
raising authentic. Just as the gnoseological circle does not end
with the step of the acquisition of existing knowledge, but pro-
ceeds to the phase of the creation of new knowledge, so neither
may consciousness-raising come to a halt at the stage of the
revelation of reality. Its authenticity is at hand only when the
practice of the revelation of reality constitutes a dynamic and
dialectical unity with the practice of transformation of reality.

I think that certain observations can and should be made on the
basis of these reflections. One of them is a criticism I make of
myself, and it is that, in Educagdo como prética da liberadade,
in considering the process of consciousness-raising, I took the
moment of the revelation of social reality as if it were a kind of
psychological motivator of the transformation of that reality. My
mistake, obviously, was not in recognizing the basic importance
of the cognition of reality in the process of its transformation;
rather my mistake consisted in not having addressed these
poles—knowledge of reality and transformation of reality—in
their dialecticity. I had spoken as if the unveiling of reality auto-
matically made for its transformation. *

*Paulo Freire, Acdo cultural para a liberdade e outros escritos (Rio de Janeiro:
Paz e Terra, 1987).

CHAPTER

f my position at the time had been mechanistic, I would not

even have spoken of the raising of consciousness, of conscienti-

zacdo. | spoke of conscientizagéo because, even with my slips
in the direction of idealism, my tendency was to review and revise
promptly, and thus, adopting a consistency with the practice I had,
to perceive that practice as steeped in the dialectical movement
back and forth between consciousness and world.

In an antidialectically mechanistic position, I would have rejected,
like all mechanists, the need for conscientizacdo and education be-
fore a radical change in the material conditions of society can occur.

Neither, as I have asserted above, is an antidialectical perspective
compatible with an understanding of critical awareness other than
as an epiphenomenon—‘as a result of social changes, not as a factor
of the same” (Erica Marcuse, 1986).

It is interesting to observe that, for the idealistic, nondialectical
comprehension of the relationship between awareness and world,
one can still speak of conscientizagdo as an instrument for changing
the world, provided this change be realized only in the interiority
of awareness, with the world itself left untouched. Thus, conscienti-
za¢gao would produce nothing but verbiage.

From the viewpoint of a mechanistic dogmatism, there is no point
in speaking of conscientizagao at all. Hence the dogmatic, authori-
tarian leaderships have no reason to engage in dialogue with the
popular classes. They need only tell them what they should do.

(Mechanistically or idealistically, it is impossible to understand

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 105

what occurs in the relations prevailing between oppressors and op-
pressed, whether as individuals or as social classes.

YOnly in a dialectical understanding, let us repeat, of how aware-
ness and the world are given, is it possible to comprehend the
phenomenon of the introjection of the oppressor by the oppressed,
the latter's “adherence” to the former, the difficulty that the op-
pressed have in localizing the oppressor outside pcs’

Once again the moment comes to mind when, twenty-five years
ago, I heard from Erich Fromm, in his house in Cuernavaca, his
blue eyes flashing: “An educational practice like that is a kind of
historico-sociocultural and political psychoanalysis.”

This is what dogmatic, authoritarian, sectarian mechanists fail to
perceive, and nearly always reject as “idealism.”

Af the great popular masses are without a more critical under-

Pein, of how society functions, it is not because they are naturally
incapable of it—to my view—but on account of the precarious condi-
tions in which they live and survive, where they are “forbidden to

know.7 Thus, the way out is not ideological propaganda and political

“sloganizing,” as the mechanists say it is, but the critical effort
through which men and women take themselves in hand and be-
come agents of curiosity, become investigators, become subjects in
an ongoing process of quest for the revelation of the “why” of things
and facts. Hence, in the area of adult literacy, for example, I have
long found myself insisting on what I call a “reading of the world
and reading of the word.” Not a reading of the word alone, nor a
reading only of the world, but both together, in dialectical solidarity.

It is precisely a “reading of the world” that enables its subject or
agent to decipher, more and more critically, the “limit situation” or
situations beyond which they find only “untested feasibility.”

I must make it clear, however, that, consistently with the dialecti-
cal position in which I place myself, in terms of which I perceive
the relations among world-consciousness-practice-theory-reading-
of-the-world-reading-of-the-word-context-text, the reading of the
world cannot be the reading made by academicians and imposed on
the popular classes. Nor can such a reading be reduced to a compla-
cent exercise by educators in which, in token of respect for popular

*See, among others, Sartre, Fanon, Memmi, and Freire.

—_—

106 - PAULO FREIRE

culture, they fall silent before the “knowledge of living experience”
and adapt themselves to it.

The dialectical, democratic position implies, on the contrary, the
‘nfaailadion of the intellectual as an indispensable condition of his
or her task. ‘Nor do I see any betrayal of democracy here/ Democracy
is betrayed when contradicted by authoritarian attitudes and prac-
tices, as well as by spontaneous, irresponsibly permissive attitudes
and practices. \

It is in thisense that I insist once more on the imperative need
of the progressive educator to familiarize herself or himself with the
syntax and semantics of the popular groups—to understand how
those persons do their reading of the world, to perceive that “crafti-
ness of theirs so indispensable to the culture of a resistance that
is in the process of formation, without which they cannot defend
themselves from the violence to which they are subjected.

Educators need an understanding of the meaning their festivals
have as an integral part of the culture of resistance, a respectful
sense of their piety in a dialectical perspective, and not only as if
it were a simple expression of their alienation. Their piety, their
religiousness, must be respected as their right, regardless of
whether we reject it personally (and if so, whether we reject religion
as such, or merely do not approve the particular manner of its prac-
tice in a given popular group).

In a recent conversation with Brazilian sociologist Professor
Otavio Ianni, of UNICAMP, I received a report from him of some
of his encounters with young activists of the Left, one of them in
prison, in Recife, in 1963. Ianni not only made no effort to hide his °
emotion at what he had seen and heard, but approved and endorsed
the way these militants respected popular culture, and within that
culture, the manifestations of their religious beliefs.

“What do you need,” Ianni asked the young prisoner.

“A Bible,” he answered.

“I thought youd want Lenin’s Que fazer? (What is to be done?),”
said Ianni.

“I dont need Lenin just now. I need the Bible. I need a better
understanding of the peasants mystical universe. Without that un-
derstanding, how can I communicate with them?”

Besides the democratic, ethical duty to proceed in this way, in-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 107

cumbent on the progressive educator, such a procedure is also de-
manded by requirements in the field of communication, as the
young person in Recife had discerned.

Unless educators expose themselves to the popular culture across

e board, their discourse will hardly be heard by anyone but them-
selves) Not only will it be lost, and inoperative, it may actually
reinforce popular dependency, by underscoring the much-vaunted
“linguistic superiority” of the popular classes. |

It is once more against the background of a dialectical comprehen-
sion of the relationship between world and awareness, between eco-
nomic production and cultural production, that it seems valid to me
to call progressive educators attention to the contradictory move-
ment between culture's “negativities’ and “positivities.” There can
be no doubt, for example, that our slavocratic past*® marks us as a
whole still today. It cuts across the social classes, dominant and
dominated alike. Both have worldviews and practices significantly
indicative of that past, which thereby continues ever to be ‘present.
But our slavocratic past is not evinced exclusively in the almighty
lord who orders and threatens and the humiliated slave who “obeys”
in order to stay alive. It is also revealed in the relationship between
the two. It is precisely by obeying in order to stay alive that the
slave eventually discovers that “obeying,” in this case, is a form of
struggle. After all, by adopting such behavior, the slave survives.
And it is from learning experience to learning experience that a
culture of resistance is gradually founded, full of “wiles,” but full of
dreams, as well Fall of rebellion, amidst apparent accommodation.

The quilombos*!—the hiding places used by runaway slaves—
constituted an exemplary moment in that learning process of rebel-
lion—of a reinvention of life on the part of slaves who took their
existence and history in hand, and, starting with the necessary “obe-
dience,” set out in quest of the invention of freedom.

In a recent public discussion entitled, “Presence of the People in
the National Culture,” in which I participated, along with the Brazil-
ian sociologist I have already mentioned, Otdvio Ianni, the latter,
referring to this slavocratic past of ours and the marks it has left on
our society, brought out its positive signs as well—the slaves resis-
tance, their rebellion. He spoke of the corresponding struggles,
today, of the “landless,” the “homeless,” the “schoolless,” the “food-

108 - PAULO FREIRE

less,” the “jobless,” as current kinds of quilombos, or “under-
ground railroads. ”

fit is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this
tradition of struggle, of resistance, and “work it.) It is a task that, to
be sure, is a perverted one from the purely idealist outlook, as
well as from the mechanistic, dogmatic, authoritarian viewpoint that
converts education into pure “communication,” the sheer transmis-
sion of neutral content.

Another consideration that I cannot refrain from entertaining in
this book is the question of the programmatic content of education.
I seem to be misunderstood on this matter at times.

This calls for a reflection on educational practice itself, which is
taking shape before our eyes.

Let us “step back” from educational practice—as I now do in
writing, in the silence, not only of my office, but of my neighbor-
hood—in order the better to “close in” on it again, take it by sur-
prise, in its component elements in their reciprocal relationship.

As an object of my curiosity, which curiosity is now operating
epistemologically, the educational practice that, by “taking my dis-
tance” from it, I “close in” on, begins to reveal itself to me. The first
observation I make is that (any educational practice always implies
the existence of (1) a subject or agent (the person who instructs and
teaches); (2) the person who learns, but who by learning also
teaches; and (3) the object to be imparted and taught—the object
to be re-cognized and cognized—that is, the content; and (4) the
methods by which the teaching subject approaches the content he
or she is mediating to the educandj) Indeed, the content—in its
quality as cognoscible object to be re-cognized by the educator while
teaching it to the educand, who in turn comprehends it only by
apprehending it—cannot simply be transferred from the educator
to the educand, simply deposited in the educand by the educator.

Educational practice further involves processes, techniques, ex-
pectations, desires, frustrations, and the ongoing tension between
practice and theory, between freedom and authority, where any ex-
aggerated emphasis on either is unacceptable from a democratic
perspective, which is incompatible with authoritarianism and per-
missiveness alike.

The critical, exacting, consistent educator, in the exercise of his

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 109

or her reflection on educational practice, as in the practice itself,
always understands it in its totality. j

He or she will not center educational practice exclusively on, for
example, the educand, or the educator, or the content, or the meth-
ods, but will understand educational practice in terms of the rela-
tionship obtaining among its various components, and will perform
that practice consistently with his or her understanding, in all use
of materials, methods, and techniques.

There has never been, nor could there ever be, education without
content, unless human beings were to be so transformed that the
processes we know today as processes of knowing and formation
were to lose their current meaning.

The act of teaching and learning—which are dimensions of the
larger process of knowing—are part of the nature of the educational
process. There is no education without the teaching, systematic or
no, of a certain content. And /teach” is a transitive-relative verb. It
has both a direct and an indirect object. One who teaches, teaches
something (content) to someone (a pupil)) 7

The question that arises is not whether or not there is such a
thing as education without content (which would be at the opposite
pole from a “contentistic,” purely mechanistic education), since, let
us repeat, there has never been an educational practice without

content
(The fundamental problem—a problem of a political nature, and
colored by ideological hues—is who choses the content, and in be-
half of which persons and things the “chooser’s” teaching will be
performed—in favor of whom, against whom, in favor of what,
against what. What is the role of educands in the programmatic |
organization of content? {What is the role, on various levels, of those
at the bases—cooks, maintenance workers, security personnel, who
find themselves involved in a school’s educational practice?(What is
the role of families, social organizations, and the local community? }
Nor let it be said, in a spirit of smoldering, venomous aristocratic
elitism, that students, students’ fathers, students mothers, janitors,
security people, cooks, have “no business meddling in this —that
the question of programmatic content is of the sole jurisdiction or
competency of trained specialists. This discourse is like peas in a

110 - PAULO FREIRE

pod with i ya ge one that proclaims that an illiterate does not
know how to vote.”

(Tn the first place, to argue in favor of the active presence of pupils,
pupils fathers, pupils’ mothers, security people, cooks, and custodi-
ans in program planning, content planning, for the schools, |as the
Sao Paulo Municipal Secretariat of Education does today~in the
Workers party administration® of Luiza Erundina, does not mean
denying the indispensable need for specialists. It only means not
leaving them as the exclusive “proprietors” of a basic component of
educational stacthel it means democratizing the power of choosing
content, Which is a necessary extension of the debate over the most
democratic way of dealing with content, of proposing it to the appre-
hension of the educands instead of merely transferring it from the
educator to the educands. This is what we are doing in the Sao
Paulo Municipal Secretariat of Education.“ It is impossible to de-
mocratize the choice of content without democratizing the teaching
of content.”

Nor let it be said that this is a populist, or “democratistic’ position.
No, it is not democratistic, it is democratic. It is progressive. But it
is the position of progressives and democrats who see the urgency
of the presence of the popular classes in the debates on the destiny
of the city. Their presence in the school is a chapter in that debate,
and is a positive sign, and not something evil, something to be
deterred. This is not the position of self-styled “democrats” for whom
the presence of the people in facts and events, a people organizing,
is a sign that democracy is not doing well.

Besides considering the importance of this kind of intervention
in the destiny of the school in terms of a democratic learning pro-
cess, we can also imagine what a school will be able to learn from,
and what it will be able to teach, cooks, janitors, security guards,
fathers, and mothers, in its indispensable quest for a transcendence
of the “knowledge of living experience” in order to arrive at a more
critical, more precise knowledge, to which these persons have a
right{ This is a right of the popular classes that progressives have to
recognize and fight for if they are to be consistent—the right to
know better than they already know—alongside another right, that

of sharing in some way in the production of the as-yet-nonexistent
knowledge),

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE .- lll

Something that likewise seems to me to be important to bring
out, in any discussion or conceptualization of content, in a critical,
democratic outlook on curriculum, is|the importance of never
allowing ourselves to succumb to the naive temptation to look on
content as something magical. | /And it is interesting to observe that,
the more we look on content as something magical, the more we
tend to regard it as neutral, or to treat it in a neutral manner. For
someone understanding it as magical, content in itself has such
power, such importance, that one need only “deposit” it in educands
in order for its power to effect the desired change. And it is for this
reason that,) when content is rendered magical, or is thus under-
stood, when it is regarded as having this force in itself, then the
teacher seems to have no other task than to transmit it to the edu-
cands. Any discussion about social, political, economic, or cultural
reality—any critical, in no way dogmatic, discussion—is regarded
as not only unnecessary, but simply irrelevant.

This is not the way I see things.) As object of cognition, content
must be delivered up to the cognitive curiosity of teachers and pu-
pils. The former teach, and in so doing, learn. The latter learn, and
in so doing, teach.

As object of cognition, content cannot be taught, apprehended,
learned, known, in such a way as to escape the implications of politi-
cal ideology—which implications, as well, are to be apprehended
by the cognizing subject. Once more a “reading of the world” is
imperative that stands in dynamic interrelationship with the cogni-
tion of word-and-theme, of content, of cognoscible object.

That every reader, everyone engaged in any teaching or learning
practice, explicitly wonder about his or her work as teacher or pupil,
in mathematics, history, biology, or grammar classes, is of little im-
portance. [Chat all explicitly interrogate themselves, and see them-
selves, as participating as teacher or pupil in the experience of
critical instruction in content, that all explicitly engage in a “reading
of the world” that would be of a political nature, is not of the high-

est_necessl
What is altogether impermissible, in democratic practice, is for
teachers, subreptitiously or otherwise, to impose on their pupils
their own “reading of the world,” in whose ; amework, therefore,
they will now situate the teaching of sare The battle with the

112 - PAULO FREIRE

authoritarianism of the Right or the Left does not lead me into that
impossible “neutrality” that would be nothing but a cunning way of
seeking to conceal my option.

(The role of the progressive educator, which neither can nor ought
to-be omitted, in offering her or his “reading of the world,” is to
bring out the fact that there are other “readings of the world,” difter-
ent from the one,being offered as the educator's own, and at times
antagonistic to |

Let me repeat: 'there is no educational practice without content.
The danger, of course, depending on the educator's particular ideo-
logical position, is either that of exaggerating the educator's author-
ity to the point of authoritarianism, or that of a voiding of the
teacher's authority that will mean plunging the educand into a per-
missive climate and an equally permissive practice. Each of the two
practices implies its own distinct manner of addressing content.

In the former case, that of the exaggeration of authority to the
point of authoritarianism, the educator is ascribed the “possession”
of content. In this fashion, educators who feel that they “possess”
content, hold it as their property—regardless of whether they have
had a share in its selection—since they possess the methods by
which they manipulate the object, they will necessarily manipulate
the educands as well. Even when calling themselves progressive and
democratic, authoritarian educators of the Left, inconsistent with at
least a part of their discourse, feel so uncomfortable with critical
educands, educands who are investigators, that they cannot bring
themselves to terminate their discourse, any more than can authori-
tarian educators of the Right.

[In the latter case, we have an annihilation of the teacher’s author-
ity that plunges the educands into the above-mentioned permissive
climate and equally permissive practice, in-which, left to their own
devices, they do and undo what they please,

Devoid of limits, spontaneous practice, which shreds to pieces
something so fundamental in human beings’ formation—spontane-
ity—not having sufficient strength to deny the necessity of content,
nevertheless allows it to trickle away in a never-justifiable pedagogi-
cal “Let's pretend.”

And so, when all is said and done, there is nothing the progressive
educator can do in the face of the question of content but join battle

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 113

for good and all in favor of the democratization of society, which
necessarily implies the democratization of the school in terms, on
the one hand, of the democratization of the programming of content,
and on the other, of the democratization of the teaching of that
content. The democratization of the school, especially when we have
some say-so over the “network” or “subsystem” of which it is a part,
so that we can make a contribution to governmental change in a
democracy, is part of the democratization of society. In other words,
the democratization of the school is not a sheer epiphenomenon,
the mechanical result of the transformation of society across the
board, but is itself a factor for change, as well.

( Consistent progressive educators need not await the compre-
hensive democratization of Brazilian society in order to embrace
democratic practices with respect to content. They must not be
authoritarian today i in order to be democratic tomorrow

anaemia

pal, state, and federal S Ove Ons of a Pasemative mold, or to
“progressive” governments nevertheless tinged with the dogmatism
I have always criticized, to democratize the organization of curricu-
lum or the teaching of content. Concretely, we need neither authori-
tarianism nor permissiveness, but democratic substance.

In 1960 I wrote, for the symposium, “Education for Brazil,” spon-
sored by the Recife Regional Center for Educational Investigations,
a paper entitled, “A Primary School for Brazil” and published by
the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagégicos, no. 35 (April-June
1961). I shall cite a brief passage from this text here for the sake of
its bearing on the question under discussion in this part of this book.

The school we need so urgently [I said in 1960] is a school in
which persons really study and work. When we criticize, on the
part of other educators, the intellectualism of our schools, we
are not attempting to defend a position with regard to the school
in which the study disciplines, and the discipline of studying,
would be watered down. We may never in all of our history have
had more need of teaching, studying, learning, than we have
today. Of learning to read, write, count. Of studying history,
geography. Of understanding the situation or situations of our
country. \The intellectualism we fight is precisely that hollow,
empty, sonorous chatter, bereft of any relationship with the real-

114 - PAULO FREIRE

en

ity surrounding us, in which we are born and reared and on
which, in large part, we yet feed today. \We must be on our guard
against this sort of intellectualism, just as we must be on our
guard against a so-called antitraditionalist position that reduces
schoolwork to mere experiences of this or that, and which ex-
cuses itself from performing the hard, heavy work of serious,
honest, study, which produces intellectual discipline.

It is precisely the authoritarian, magical comprehension of con-
tent that characterizes the “vanguardist” leaderships, for whom
men’s and women’s awareness is an empty “space waiting for con-
tent—a conceptualization I have severely criticized in Pedagogy of
the Oppressed. And I criticize it again today as incompatible with
a pedagogy of hope.

But let me make one thing perfectly clear: it is not every con-
scious mind, not every awareness, that is this empty “space” waiting
for content, for the authoritarian vanguardist leaders. Not their own
awareness, for example. They feel they belong to a special group in
society (Erica Marcuse, 1986), which “owns” critical awareness as a
“datum.” They feel as if they were already liberated, or invulnerable
to domination, so that their sole task is to teach and liberate others.
Hence their almost religious care—their all but mystical devotion—
but their intransigence, too, when it comes to dealing with content,
their certitude with regard to what ought to be taught, what ought
to be transmitted.(Their conviction is that the fundamental thing is
to teach, to transmit, what ought to be taught—not “losing time,”
in “mindless chatter” with popular groups about their reading of
the world.

‘Any concern with educands expectations, whether these persons
be primary-school children, high-school students, or adults in popu-
lar education courses, is pure democratism. Any concern on the
part of the democratic educator not to wound the cultural identity
of the educands is held for harmful purism. Any manifestation of
respect for popular wisdom is considered populism.|

his conception is as consistent, on the Left, with a dogmatic
thinking, of Marxist origin, in terms of which a critical, historical
awareness is given, as I have already mentioned, almost as if it were
just “put there” (Erica Marcuse, 1986); as it is consistent, on the
Right, with the elitism that would have the dominant classes, by

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - I15

nature, knowing, and the dominated ones, by nature, ignorant.
Thus, the dominant teach when and if they feel like it; the domi-
nated learn at the price of much effort.

A dogmatic activist working in a school as a teacher is indistin-
guishable from her or his colleague working on behalf of a union,
or in a slum, except for the material differences in their respective
activities. For the former, it is imperative to “fill” the “empty” aware-
ness of educands with content whose learning process he or she as
educator already knows to be important and indispensable to the
educands. For the latter, it is likewise imperative to “fill” the “empty”
consciousness of popular groups with the working-class conscious-
ness that, according to this individual, the workers do not have, but
which the middle class judges and asserts themselves to have.

I can never forget what four German educators, of the former
East Germany, said one evening, in the early 1970s, as we sat in
the home of one of them. One spoke, while the others nodded their
assent: “I recently read the German edition of your book, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed. I was very glad you criticized students absence
from discussions of programmatic content. In bourgeois societies,”
he went on, dogmatically, “you have to talk about this, and fire
the students up about it. Not here. We know what the students
should know.”

From this point forward, after what I said to them in response, it
was hard to keep up the conversation. The visit came to an end,
and I retired earlier than I had expected to the home of a friend
who was putting me up.

It took me a while to get to sleep. I thought not only about what
I had just heard that evening in Berlin, but about what I had heard
all day long there, in a group of young scientists, university scholars.
The contrast was huge. The young people criticized the authoritar-
ianism of the regime: for them it was retrograde, antidemocratic,
and arrogant. And their criticism was lodged from within the social-
ist option, not from the outside.

The educators with whom I had just been speaking were an exam-
ple of the very thing the young scientists had spoken to me about
and had opposed.

It was hard to sleep, thinking of the supercertitude with which
those “modern” educators wove their discourse, their declaration of

116 - PAULO FREIRE

unshakable faith: “Not here. We know what the students should

This is the certitude, always, of the authoritarian, the dogmatist,
who knows what the popular classes know, and knows what they
need even without talking to them. At the same time, what the
popular classes already know, in function of their practice in the
interwoven events of their everyday lives, is so “irrelevant,” so “disar-
ticulate,” that it makes no sense to authoritarian persons. What
makes sense to them is what comes from their readings, and what
they write in their books and articles. It is what they already know
about the knowledge that seems basic and indispensable to them,
and which, in the form of content, must be “deposited” in the “empty
consciousness of the popular classes.

If anyone, on the other hand, assuming a democratic, progressive
position, therefore argues for the democratization of the program-
matic organization of content, the democratization of his or her
teaching—in other words, the democratization of curriculum—that
person is regarded by the authoritarian as too spontaneous and per-
missive, or else as lacking in seriousness.

If, as I have declared above, the neoliberal discourse has no power
to eliminate from history the existence of social classes, on one hand,
and the struggle between them, on the other, then the rug is pulled
out from under the authoritarian positions that characterize so-
called realistic socialism and underly a vertical discourse and prac-
tice of curricular organization.

Neoliberals err when they criticize and reject us for being ideo-
logical in an era, according to them, in which “ideologies have died.”

[The discourses and dogmatic practices of the Left are mistaken not
because they are ideological, but because theirs is an ideology that
connives with the prohibition of men’s and women’s curiosity, and

contributes to its alienation:

P (ay not authentically think unless others think _I simply cannot
think for others, or for others, or without others." This assertion,
owing to its implicit dialogical character, unsettles authoritarian
mentalities. This is also why they are so refractory to dialogue, to
any.idea swapping between teachers and students.

[Dialogue between teachers and students does not place them on
the same footing professionally; but it does mark the democratic

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 117

position between the Teachers and students are not identical, and
this for countless reaSons. After all, it is a difference between them
that makes them precisely students or teachers. Were they simply
identical, each could be the other! Dialogue i is meaningful precisely * of
because the dialogical subjects, the agents in the dialogue, not only 2°
retain their identity, but actively defend it, and thus grow coma |
Precisely on this account, dialogue does not level them, does not

“even them out,” reduce them to each other] Dialogue is not a favor
done by one for the other, a kind of grace accorded/On the contrary,
it implies a sincere, fundamental respect on the part of the subjects
engaged in it, a respect that is violated, or prevented from material-
izing, by authoritarianism. Permissiveness does the same thing, in
a different, but equally deleterious, way.
/ There is no dialogue inZspontaneism’ any more than in the om-
nipotence of the teacher. But a dialogical relation does not, as is
sometimes thought, rule out the possibility of the act of teaching.
On the contrary, it founds this act, which is completed and sealed in
its correlative, the act of learning,* and both become authentically
possible only when the educator's thinking, critical and concerned
though it be, nevertheless refuses to “apply the brakes” to the edu-
cand’s ability to think)-On the contrary, both “thinkings’ become
authentically possible’only when the educator's critical thinking is
delivered over to the educand’s curiosity If the educator's thinking
cancels, crushes, or hinders the development of educands thinking,
then the educator's thinking, being authoritarian, tends to generate
in the educands upon whom it impinges a timid, inauthentic, some-
times even merely rebellious, thinking.) «ag

Indeed, dialogue cannot be blamed for the warped use sometimes

made of it—for its pure imitation, or its caricature. Dialogue must
not be transformed into a noncommittal “chewing the fat’*’ to the
random rhythm of whatever happens to be transpiring between
teacher and educands.

[Pedagogical dialogue implies not only content, or cognoscible ob-
ject around which to revolve, but also a presentation concerning it
made by the educator for the ere

*See, in this regard, Eduardo Nicol, Los principios de la ciencia (Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Econémica, 1965).

4
P

118 - PAULO FREIRE

Here I should like to return to reflections I have previously made
about the “expository lesson. *

The real evil is not in the expository lesson—in the explanation
given by the teacher. This is not what I have criticized as a kind of
Sbenking {1 have criticized, and I continue to criticize, that type of
educator-educand relationship in which the educator regards him-

self or herself as the educands sole educator—in which the educator
- violates, or refuses to accept, the fundamental condition of the act of

knowing, which is its dialogical relation (Nicol, 1965), and therefore

‘establishes a relation in which the educator transfers knowledge

about a or b or c objects or elements of content to an educand

‘sf considered as pure recipient.

This is the criticism I have made, and still make. The question
now is: will every “expository classroom,” as they are called, be this?
I think not. I deny it. There are expository classrooms in which this
is indeed attempted: pure transferrals of the teachers accumulated
knowledge to the students. These are vertical classrooms, in which
the teacher, in a spirit of authoritarianism, attempts the impossible,
from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge: to transfer knowledge.

There is another kind of classroom, in which, while appearing
not to effect the transfer of content, also cancels or hinders the
educand's ability to do critical thinking. That is, there are classrooms
that sound much more like children’s songs than like genuine chal-
lenges. They house the expositions that “tame” educands, or “lull
them to sleep’—where, on the one side, the students are lulled to
sleep by the teacher's pretentious, high-sounding words, and on the
_ other, the teacher likewise doing a parcel of self-babying.(But there
“is a third position, which I regard as profoundly valid: thatin which
the teacher makes a little presentation of the subject and then the
group of students joins with the teacher in an analysis precisely of
that presentation. In this fashion, in the little introductory exposi-
tion, the teacher challenges the students, who thereupon question
themselves and question the teacher, and thereby share in plumbing

_the depths of, developing, the initial exposition) This kind of work

*Paulo Freire and Sérgio Guimaraes, Sobre educagéo—didlogos (Rio de Janeira:
Paz e Terra, 1984).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE «- 119

may in no wise be regarded as negative, as traditional schooling in
the pejorative sense.

Finally, I find yet another kind of teacher whom I do not regard
as a banker. It is that very serious teacher who, in conducting a
course, adopts a relationship with the subject, with the content, of
which she or he is treating, that is one of profound, affectionate,
almost loving respect, whether that content be constituted of a text
composed by the teacher or a text composed by someone else. Ulti-
mately, he or she is bearing witness to the educands as to how he
or she studies, “approaches,” or draws near a given subject, how she
or he thinks critically. Now the educands must have, or create and
develop, the critical ability to accompany the teacher's movement
in his or her attempt to approach the topic under consideration.

From a certain point of view, this kind of teacher also commits
an error. It consists in ignoring the fact that the knowledge relation
does not terminate in the object. In other words, the knowledge
relationship is not exclusively between a cognizing subject and a
cognoscible object. It “bridges over” to another subject, basically
becoming a subject-object-subject relation.

( As a democratic relationship, dialogue is the opportunity available
to me to open up to the thinking of others, and thereby not wither
away in isolation? °° *v" Wi

Pedagogy of the Oppressed first saw the light of day twenty-four
years ago, under the impulse of this sentiment with which, more
touched by it and enveloped in it than before, I revisit it in this
Pedagogy of Hope.

I began this book by saying that a poem, a song, a sculpture, a
painting, a book, a piece of music, a fact or deed, an occurrence,
never have just one reason to explain them. An event, a fact, a deed
of love or hatred, a poem, a book, are always found wrapped in thick
webs, tapestries, frameworks, and touched by manifold whys, of
which some are more proximate to the occurrence or creation—
more visible as a why.

A great proportion of the first part of this book has centered on
a grasp of certain of the tapestries or frameworks in which Pedagogy
of the Oppressed took its origin.

Now, in the latter part of this volume, I shall speak of facts, occur-

120 - PAULO FREIRE

rences, tapestries, or frameworks in which I have shared and am
sharing and which have revolved around Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Published in New York in September 1970, Pedagogy immediately

began to be translated into various languages, sparking curiosity, and
favorable criticism in some cases, unfavorable in others. By 1974 the
book had been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, German,
Dutch, and Swedish, and its publication in London by Penguin Books
carried Pedagogy to Africa, Asia, and Oceania, as well.
The book appeared at an intensely troubled moment in history.
Social movements appeared, in Europe, the United States, and
Latin America, each with its own space-time and particular charac-
teristics. There was the struggle with sexual, racial, cultural, and
class discrimination. In Europe, there was the struggle waged by
the Greens to protect the environment. Coups détat with a new
face, in Latin America, with new military governments replacing
those of the previous decade. Now the coups were ideologically
based, and all of them were coupled in one way or another to the
locomotive of the North going full steam ahead for what seemed to
it the capitalist destiny of the continent. There were the guerrilla
wars in Latin America, the base communities, the liberation move-
ments in Africa, independence for former Portuguese colonies, the
battle in Namibia. There were Amflcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, their
leadership in Africa and its repercussions outside Africa. China.
Mao. The Cultural Revolution. A lively loyalty to the meaning of
the May of 1968. There were the political and pedagogical union
movements—all of them obviously political, especially in Italy.
There was Guevara, murdered the decade before, present as a sym-
bol not only for Latin-American revolutionary movements, but for
progressive leaders and activists the world over. There was the Viet-
nam War, and the reaction in the United States. There was the fight
for civil rights, and the climate of the 1960s in the area of political
culture overflowed, in that country, into the 1970s.

These, with their numberless implications and developments,
were some of the social, cultural, political, and ideological historical
fabrics that explain, in part, both the curiosity the book aroused,
and with the tenor of the reading and the acceptance with which it
met—whether it was accepted or rejected, and what criticisms were
made of it.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 12]

As I did not systematically keep and duly comment on the letters
that came to me from each respective linguistic region of the world
after each new translation of Pedagogy is something I regret today
with an almost physical pain. They were letters from the United
States, Canada, Latin America, and after the publication by Penguin
Books, Australia, New Zealand, the islands of the South Pacific,
India, and Africa, such was the effectiveness of that publisher's dis-
tribution network. After the letters, or sometimes with them, came
invitations to discuss and debate theoretico-practical points of the
book. Not infrequently, in Geneva, for a day or longer, I would host
a group of university students, accompanied by their teacher, who
would be running a course or seminar on Pedagogy, or a group of
workers, especially Italian workers, but also immigrant workers in
Switzerland, who—from a more political perspective than the one
maintained by the university students—wanted to have points ex-
plained and aspects illuminated bearing directly on their practice.

I remember now, for example: there was a series of coinciding
positions on political pedagogy, my positions in the book and posi-
tions in the general view maintained by the Italian union leaders
then heading up the battle for what they called the “fifty hours.”
The movement was finally victorious in obtaining recognition of
workers right to take courses on work time.

On various occasions, in Geneva, or in Italy, I met with some of

these leadership teams to discuss points of practical theory in their
struggle in terms of dimensions of the book.
- It was in those days that we began to form a group and hold
discussions just among ourselves: Elza Freire, Miguel Darcy de
Oliveira, Rosiska de Oliveira, Claudius Ceccon, myself, and, later,
Marcos Arruda and the Institute for Cultural Action. The IDAC
team was playing a truly important role just then, in seminars on
Pedagogy of the Oppressed held throughout Europe, the United
States, and Canada. A time or two, as first director of IDAC, I
participated in some of those seminars analyzing the book.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how much I was enriched by
the discussions I held, for hours on end, with German university
youth, whether in Geneva or in their universities in Germany. I
could not help being struck with their strong liking for theoretical
discussion, and the seriousness with which they challenged me on

122 - PAULO FREIRE

the basis of their careful, rigorous reading, which they had done
either by themselves or along with their professor. Or how much it
likewise enriched me to engage in discussions with Italian or Span-
ish labor leaders—with the former, as I have said, in meetings in
Geneva or Italy, while with the latter I could only meet in Geneva,
since at that time Pedagogy of the Oppressed was contraband in
Spain and Portugal alike. Franco Spain, like Salazar’s Portugal,*
had shut us both out. Pedagogy and me.

It was at that time, and on account of Pedagogy, that I came in
contact with the harsh reality of one of the most serious traumas of
the “Third World in the First”: the reality of the so-called guest
workers—lItalians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, in
Switzerland, in France, in Germany—and their experience of racial,
class, and sexual discrimination.

In one of the seminars in which I took part in Germany, on literacy
and postliteracy programs for Portuguese workers, I was told by
some of the latter that their German colleagues despised them to
the point, and in such a way, that they regarded them as incapable
of ever speaking their language, so that when they spoke to them
in German they put all the verbs in the infinitive mood. And surely
enough, one of the Portuguese workers told me, in German, refer-
ring to a fellow worker: “He to like the meeting very much, but not
to understand everything.”

In Paris, in one of these seminars on Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
a Spanish worker, enraged and almost in physical pain, protested a
lack of class solidarity on the part of his French colleagues. “Lots of
em come up and kick our butt,” he said, with irritation, “if were
not lookin!”

Behavior like this could reinforce today’s neoliberal discourse, ac-
cording to which the social classes are vanishing. They no longer
exist, we hear. They existed, though, at the moment of the above-
mentioned unburdening on the part of the Spanish worker, and they
exist today as well. But their existence does not necessarily betoken
a level of solidarity on the part of their members, especially interna-
tionally. At the same time, sectors of the dominated themselves are
steeped in the authoritarian, discriminatory, dominant ideology. It
becomes installed in them, and causes them to see and feel them-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 123

selves to be superior to their companions who have left the land of
their origin and wear the mark of need.

One of the serious problems that alert, politically engaged guest-
worker leaders had to confront in the 1970s, and they discussed it
with me in connection with their reading of Pedagogy, was a lack of
motivation on the part of their companions for any commitment to
the political struggles transpiring in the lands of their origin.

I myself took part in meetings in Switzerland, France, and Ger-
many with immigrant workers at which I heard discourses evincing
far more concern for an easier life in their experience far from their
native lands, than of a desire to return to those lands one day in
conditions appreciably better than those in which they had once
left them. It was readily perceptible, in those days, whether in the
meetings I have mentioned, or in conversations with leaders in
which I was told of these difficulties of mobilization and political
organization, that a great many of the workers who had emigrated
to the new, “loan” context were taken, on the one hand, with a
feeling of relief and joy that they had work now, and at the same
time, with a sense of fear: fear of losing the tiny bit of security that
they had found in their “loan” context. Their feelings of insecurity
were too great for the minimal courage they would have needed for
the adventure and risk of political commitment, however slight a
commitment. The time that they had spent living in their countries
of origin, the hope of employment, of security, had caused them to
stake everything on employment, in the loan context, instead of on
structural changes in their own context. These persons, a great pro-
portion of the guest workers-to-be, had left their context of origin
under the crushing burden of a weariness that I called, in those days,

(“existential weariness —not a physical weariness, but a spiritual
weariness, which left those caught in it emptied of courage, emptied
of hope, and above all, seized with a fear of adventure and risk. And
with the weariness came what I dubbed: “historical anesthesia.”)

On one of my visits to Germany for a discussion with Portuguese
guest workers, which was held in a Catholic parish that was sponsor-
ing an excellent program in political pedagogy, I heard from a young
priest the following story: “A short while ago I received a complaint
from three Portuguese workers that they and many of their compan-
ions were being severely exploited by the landlords of their little

124 - PAULO FREIRE

shacks: super-high rent, flouting of the law governing tenant rights
and obligations, and so on.

“So I decided,” continued the father, “after talking about it at
Mass one Sunday, to call a meeting of anyone willing to discuss the
question with me and try to figure out what could be done. Several
parishioners came to the meeting. We worked together for two ses-
sions, and we programmed a strategy against the almighty landlords:
complaints in the newspapers, fliers, walks through the parish
neighborhood, and so on.

“So we began putting the plan in practice—until a committee of
tenants, including one of the ones who had made the complaint to
me in the first place, came to me personally and requested that I
call off the campaign. They had been threatened with eviction unless
I stopped the accusations.” And I still remember the words with
which the priest concluded his story: “I felt a powerful tension, an
ethical tension, between continuing to fight the exploiters, who now
had gone so far as to take advantage of the emotional dependency
of the oppressed and were blackmailing thera, and respecting the
tenants pusillanimity and calling off the struggle, thereby restoring
to them a sense of relative security—basically a false security, but
one they couldnt do without—in which they lived.”

In line after line of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I discuss this
phenomenon. Fanon and Memmi* did the same, or had done it
before me. I mean the fear that fills the oppressed, as individuals
and as a class, and prevents them from struggling. But fear is no
abstraction, and neither is the “why” of fear an abstraction. Fear is
altogether concrete, and is caused by concrete considerations—or
considerations that seem concrete, so that, in the absence of any
demonstration to the contrary, they might as well be.

And so the leadership, which, for any number of reasons, enjoys
a different, higher level of “immunization” to the fear that affects
the masses, must adopt a special way of leading where that fear is
concerned. Once more, then, it becomes incumbent upon them to
( maintain a serious, rigorous relationship between tactics and strat-
egy, a relationship of which I have already spoken in this book. In

*Franz Fanon, Os condenados da Terra; Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the
Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 125

the last analysis, the problem facing the leaders is: they must learn,
through the critical reading of reality that must always be made,
what actions can be tactically implemented, and on what levels they
can be so implemented. In other words, what can we do now in
order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?
In the case I have just narrated of the German parish, the solution
to the problem from which the workers fear could not be eliminated
was found in a tactical freeze on the action initiated. Here was an
action that could be resumed further down the line, after a project
in political pedagogy from which a victory over the fear, at least in
part, would be won. That project would reveal to the workers that
their landlords are vulnerable, too. Guevara, as well, spoke about
this aspect of thé dialectical relationship between oppressors and
oppressed—of the'need for the latter to be given objectives whereby
they can become convinced of the vulnerability of the former, as a
decisive moment in the struggle. Indeed, the more the oppressed
see the oppressors as “unbeatable,” endowed with an invincible
power, the less they believe in themselves. \Thus has it ever been.
One of the tasks of a progressive popular education, yesterday as
today, is to seek, by means of a critical understanding of the mecha-
nisms of social conflict, to further the process in which the weakness
of the oppressed turns into a strength capable of converting the
oppressors strength into weakness. This is a hope that moves us.

While I lived one-half of the decade of the sixties in the climate
of the Brazilian transition that was shattered by the 1964 coup, and
the other half in Chile, where I wrote Pedagogy—in the seventies,
with the book multiplying in various languages, I saw myself ex-
posed, along with it, to challenges that sparked analyses on my
part, and these analyses in many cases confirmed and reinforced
the book's basic theses.

It is impossible, in my view, to overrate the importance of the
innumerable meetings and encounters in which I took part with
students and professors of German, Swiss, English, Dutch, Bel-
gian, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Latin-American, African, Asian,
United States, and Canadian universities. This is why I speak so
much of them here. And sprinkled among these meetings of an
academic nature, the no less rich Saturdays to which I was subjected
by groups of workers.

126 - PAULO FREIRE

The tonic administered by the former—a First World audience—
with an occasional exception, came in the form of a theoretical analy-
sis. My interlocutors would assess the degree of rigor with which I
had approached this theme or that one, or the precision of my
language, or the evident influence on me of this thinker or that one
(whose work, at times, I had not read!). Or the inconsistency into
which I had slipped between something I had said on, for instance,
page 25, and something else on page 122. The German students
loved this kind of critique.

When the encounters occurred with Third World students, a dif-
ferent tonic was administered. Here, discussion turned preponder-
antly on political questions, and these led us to philosophical,
ethical, ideological, and epistemological questions.

In my meetings with immigrant workers, Italians, Spaniards, Por-
tuguese, of whom a large proportion had also read Pedagogy, in
Italian, Spanish, or French, interest always centered on a more criti-
cal understanding of practice in order to improve future practice.

While the university people, generally speaking, tried to find and
“understand a certain practice imbedded in a theory,” the workers
sought to sneak up on the theory that was imbedded in their prac-
tice. Regardless of the world I found myself in with labor leaders
who were immersed in personal experience of politics and policy
for changing the world, this is how it always was. It did not matter
whether those leaders belonged to the Third World of the Third or
to the Third World of the First. This is always the way it was.

Once or twice, in Geneva or away, I had the opportunity of work-
ing in long seminars with workers and academicians, obviously pro-
gressive. I hope they still take that position today, and have not given
in to the ideology of those who decree the death of the ideologies
and who proclaim that the dream is a way of fleeing the world
instead of re-creating it.

I had one of the encounters to which I have just referred, a hugely
rich one, with academicians and a Spanish laborer, one weekend
some time in the 1970s, in Germany, in Frankfurt, to be precise.
Two or three groups of progressive intellectuals, respectively Marx-
ists and Christians, who did not relate well with each other, agreed
to come together for a study day provided I took part.

I have always found it worthwhile to serve as the pretext for a

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 127

good cause. So I accepted the invitation and went, along with two
German friends—theologians, both of them, clear-sighted, creative,
serious intellectuals: Werner Simpfendoerfer, who was to translate
Pedagogy into German, and Ernst Lang, now deceased, director of
the World Council of Churches, who had invited my collaboration
in that body and who was to write the preface to the German edition.

The language of the meeting was German, with a simultaneous
translation into English for me, and from English into German for
the others, except for the theologians.

One of the groups had invited a laborer, a Spanish guest worker,
who spoke German without any difficulty.

The presence of the Spanish worker had the effect of keeping the
meeting on a level of equilibrium between the necessary abstraction
and a quest for the concrete. In other words, the presence of the
laborer lessened the risk that abstraction might renounce its authen-
tic nature and meander about in a vagueness ever more distant from
the concrete.

When we took our first coffee break, the worker came over to me
and we began to converse in Spanish. We alone understood each
other now. No one in hearing, other than ourselves, understood
Spanish, as was to be expected.

After a few perfunctory remarks, with which we were actually
working up to a little conversation, the Spanish worker said: “I have
to admit intellectual qualities in these young people that make me
admire them. Theyre devoted to the cause of the working class.
They work tirelessly. But they seem to think that revolutionary truth
is pretty much their private property. Well, now, we guest workers
..., he added, with a twinkle in his eye, “. . . were a sort of new
game for them.”

There was wisdom, there was grace in his discourse, without grief,
and without anger. It was as if the truth infusing his words gave him
the peace with which he spoke. He spoke of the problem he had
mentioned with the tranquility of someone who knew his “why.”

We chatted a while longer, commenting on the elitism, the au-
thoritarianism, the dogmatism of the positions he had criticized. At
one point he told me: “I have an interesting experience to tell you
about—something I was involved in before I read your Pedagogy of
the Oppressed.

128 - PAULO FREIRE

“I’m an activist in a Leftist political movement working both in
Spain and outside. One of our jobs is training immigrants politically
so that we can then all go out and try to mobilize and organize other
guest workers.

“A year ago, or so, five of us got together to try to work out a
course in political problems to offer our fellow immigrants. We met
for a discussion, just among ourselves, one Saturday afternoon in
the home of one of these activists. We figured out what we thought
the course ought to be, content and presentation. Finally, the way
you academics like to do, we laid it all out on in a nice, orderly
package ready to bestow on our future pupils. We were sure we
knew not only what our people would like to know, but what they
ought to know. So why waste time listening to them? All we had
to do was communicate to them what they could expect in the
course. All wed have to do was announce the course and enroll the
applicants.

“Once we had the program worked out, with the weekend times,
the place, the whole thing—we started looking for students.

“Total failure. No one was interested. We spoke to everybody we
could. We laid out the content, we visited a number of people and
explained how important the program was, how important the
course was, and. . . nothing came of it.

“We got together one Saturday to try to figure out why wed failed.
Suddenly I got an idea.

“Why not take a survey, in the factories? Why not talk with lots
_ of people, one at a time, and find out what each oned like to do?
Why not ask them what they prefer, and what they usually do on
weekends? Then, on the basis of that, we ought to be able to figure

‘\,( out how to ‘get to them, instead of just starting out with what we're

so sure they ought to know)

“We decided to give it “a try. We gave ourselves two weeks to
conduct the survey, and scheduled another meeting of the five of us
after that, for an evaluation. And out we went to conduct the survey.

“After two weeks we got together again as planned, the five of us,
each with a report on the job wed done. Lots of the Spaniards liked
to play cards on weekends. Then there was a bunch that liked to go
for hikes. Some others went to parks, or to supper in each other's
houses, or would sit around drinking beer, and so on.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 129

“We picked the card games. Maybe this would be an ‘in with
them, to get to political problems. So we practiced up at cards,”
the Spanish worker went on, enthusiastically, “and we started going
around stopping in on the groups that would play cards on week-
ends, in each others homes. Then during the week wed get to-
gether, the five of us, for an evaluation.

“Sometimes during a game, with my cards in my hand, not looking
at anybody, Id just kind of casually ask, “Know what happened yes-
terday in Madrid?’

““No, theyd say.

“Cops raided some of our guys and locked ‘em up. For one little
protest march.

“Nobody said a word.

“T didnt either.

“Well, gotta go, Id say, then I'd stop in on another game, and
then another. Another question, a political question.

“All five of us kept doing this, in different places.

“After four months, we could finally get a bunch of them together
to discuss if we'd like to get up some systematic meetings on politics.
There were thirty of us at the first meeting, and we made a joint
decision to run a real course on political problems. And we've had
the best results we've ever had.”

He laughed when I told him, “That proves that if we want to work
with the people and not just for them we have to know their ‘game. ”

This is precisely what authoritarian educators are always fighting.
They claim to be progressive, and yet they regard themselves as
proprietors of knowledge, which they need only extend to the igno-
rant educands. These people always see signs of permissiveness
or “spontaneism” in the respect that radical democrats show for
educands.

These people will never understand what it means to start with
the reading of the world, the comprehension of the world, had by
the educands. All surprised, as if they had made a great discovery,
they say their practice proves that staying on the lower level of
knowledge that the groups have, without trying to teach them any-
thing beyond that knowledge, does not work. Of course it does not
wor is so obvious that it does not work that there is no point in
bothering to prove it. One of the main reasons for the lack of spirit

130 - PAULO FREIRE

and inspiration in team members who get together to evaluate their
practice is that the person running the evaluation process has no
more sophisticated knowledge than the team has. No research is
needed to establish the inviability of an evaluation seminar in which
the coordinator lacks that particular knowledge with which he or
she might explain the obstacles encountered by the participants in
their practice. The normal tendency will be the failure of the semi-
nar. So will a physics course fail unless the teacher knows physics.
One does not teach what one does not know.\ But neither, in a
democratic perspective, ought one to teach what one knows without,

,. first, knowing what those one is about to teach know and on what

»* level they know it; and second, without respecting this knowledge.
One begins with that which is implicit in the reading of the world
of those about to learn what the one about to teach knows.

This is what my practice, consistent with my democratic option,
has taught me. This is also what the Spanish workers I have just
spoken of were taught by their practice.

I should like to suggest certain further considerations in connec-
tion with the Spanish workers experience. First let me present a
consideration along the lines of political ethics. Educators have the
right, even the duty, to teach what seems to them to be fundamental
to the space-time in which they find themselves. That right and
that duty fall to the educator by virtue of the intrinsic “directivity”
of education. Of its very nature, education always “outstrips itself.”
It always pursues objectives and goals, dreams and projects. I have
asked before, in this book: what sort of educator would I be if I had
no concern for being maximally convincing in my presentation of
my dreams? But that does not mean that I may reduce everything
to my truth, my “correctness.” On the other hand, even though I
may be convinced, like the Spanish worker-activists, for example,
that reflection on the political life of a town or city is essential, I
may not on that account dictate the themes on which that political
analysis and reflection must bear. A rather moralistic viewpoint
would brand as disloyal the tactic of the Spanish workers in using
card games to make a political approach to their companions and
thereby render viable their objective of seriously studying the politi-
cal question in Spain with them. This is not how I see it. They are
as ethical as academicians could be in their own research.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 13]

The second reflection I should like to offer is far more positive. It
regards the validity, in Latin America today, not only of the principle
invoked by the Spanish workers, but of their work method. The
popular educator must make a democratic option and act consis-
tently with that option. I fail to see how popular education, regard-
less of where and when it is practiced, could prescind from the
critical effort to involve, on the one side, educators, and on the
other, educands, in a quest for the “why” of the facts. In other words,
in a popular education focusing on cooperative production, union
activity, community mobilization and organization so that the com-
munity can take the education of its sons and daughters in hand
through community schools—without this having to mean an excuse
for the state to neglect one of its duties, that of offering the people
education, along with care for their health, literacy, and their educa-
tion after the attainment of literacy—in any hypothesis, there is no
discarding the gnoseological process. The process of knowing be-
longs to the very nature of education, and so-called popular educa-
tion is no exception. On the other hand, popular education, in a
progressive outlook, is not reducible to the purely technical training
of which groups of workers have a real need. This will of course be
the narrow training that the dominant class so eagerly offers work-
ers—a training that merely reproduces the working class as such.
Naturally, in a progressive perspective as well, a technical formation
is also a priority. But alongside it is another priority, which must
not be shoved out of the picture. For example, the worker learning
the trade of machinist, mechanic, or stonemason has the right and
the need to learn it as well as possible—but also has the right to
know the “why” of the technical procedure itself. The worker has
the right to know the historical origins of the technology in question,
and to take it as an object of curiosity and reflect on the marvelous
advance it implies—along with the risks it exposes us to, of which
Neil Postman warns us of in an extraordinary recent book.* This is
doubtless not only a profoundly current issue of our time, but a vital
one, as well. And the working class should not be part of the em-
ployer-employee relationship simply in the way the worker in “Mod-

*Neil Postman, Technopoly—the Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York:
Knopf, 1992).

132 - PAULO FREIRE

ern Times” saw himself wildly struggling to tighten the screws that
came along the assembly line, in the critique we have trom the
genius of Charlie Chaplin.

‘Jt seems to me to be fundamental for us today, whether we be
mechanics or physicists, pedagogues or stonemasons, cabinetmakers
or biologists, to adopt a critical, vigilant, scrutinizing attitude toward
technology, without either demonizing it or “divinizing” it. )

Never perhaps, has the almost trite concept of exercising control
over technology and placing it at the service of human beings been
in such urgent need of concrete implementation as today—in de-
fense of freedom itself, without which the dream of a democracy
is evacuated.

The progressive postmodern, democratic outlook in which I take
my position acknowledges the right of the working class to be trained
in such a way that they will know how their society functions, know
their rights and duties, know the history of the working class and
the role of the popular movements in remaking society in a more
democratic mold. The working class has a right to know its geogra-
phy, and its language—or rather, a critical understanding of lan-
guage in its dialectical relationship with thought and world: the
dialectical interrelations of language, ideology, social classes, and
education.

In a recent brief trip through Europe, I heard from a European
sociologist, a friend of mine recently returned from Africa, that
political activists of a certain African country were saying that the
“Freire era’ had come and gone. What is needed now, they were
saying, is no longer an education faithfully dedicated to a critical
understanding of the world, but an education strictly devoted to the
technical training of a labor force. As if, in a progressive view, it
were possible to dichotomize technology and politics! The ones who
attempt this dichotomy, as I have emphasized above, are the domi-
nant class. Hence the wealth of discourse with which we are be-
sieged today in favor of the pragmatic ideal of adjusting ourselves to
the world at hand in the name of the values of capitalism. In this
new history of ours, without social classes, and thus without any
conflicts other than purely personal ones, we have nothing other to
do than to let the calloused hands of the many and the smooth ones
of the few remake the world at last into a festival.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 133

Really, I do not believe in this. But I hear and regret the mistake
in which the above-mentioned African activists are caught: the long,
intensely tragic experience that has so long victimized them, their
rejection as John, as Mary, as persons, as sex, as race, as culture, as
history, the disregard for their lives, which to a perversely murder-
ous white supremacy are of no value, so that those lives can just “be
there,” stand there practically like an inanimate object that never-
theless moves and speaks and is under white command, and any
black life can simply die or disappear and white supremacy will not
care one little bit. This long, tragic experience, so worthily human-
ized by their people's struggle, by that fine, high struggle, has never-
theless bequeathed them, through and through, that same kind of
existential weariness that suddenly came upon the guest workers in
Europe, as I have described above. The illusion is that today’s his-
torical moment calls on the men and women of their country to wage
a completely different struggle from the one before—a struggle in
which technology would replace people's political formation alto-
gether. At the same time, the blurring of political parameters rein-
forces the fatalism that marks “existential weariness,” inviting us to
resign ourselves to a “hope’ in which only an adverbial change is
possible in the world.

But the truth is: regardless of what society we are in, in what
world we find ourselves, (it is impermissible to train engineers or
stonemasons, physicians or nurses, dentists or machinists, educators
or mechanics, farmers or philosophers, cattle farmers or biologists,
without an understanding of our own selves as historical, political,
social, and cultural beings—without a comprehension of how society
works. And this will never be imparted by a supposedly purely
technological training. )

Another concern on which popular education must never turn its
back is epistemological research, antecedent to or concomitant with
teaching practices, especially in peasant regions. This is a task that
has become dear to the ethnoscience being plied among us today
in Brazil: to know how rural popular groups, indigenous or not,
know—how they organize their agronomic knowledge or science,
for example, or their medicine, to which end they have developed
a broadly systemized taxonomy of plants, herbs, trees, spices, roots.
It is interesting to observe how they integrate their meticulous tax-

134 + PAULO FREIRE

onomy with miraculous promises—for example an herbal tea that
heals both cancer and the pangs of unrequited love, or battles male
impotence; or special leaves for protection in childbirth, for “fallen
breastbone,” and so on. Pony

Recent research in Brazilian universities has verified the actual
medical usefulness of certain discoveries made by popular wisdom.

| For example, to discuss with peasants this ongoing university-level
verification of their knowledge is a political task of high pedagogical
importance. Such discussion can help the popular classes win confi-
dence in themselves, or augment the degree of confidence they have
already attained.) Confidence in themselves is so indispensable to
their struggle for a better world! I have already made reference to
the need for it in this book.

What seems to me to be unconscionable, however, today as yester-
day, would be to conceive—or even worse, to practice—a popular
education in which a constant, serious approach were not main-
tained, antecedently and concomitantly, to problems like: what con-
tent to teach, in behalf of what this content is to be taught, in behalf
of whom, against what, and against whom. Who selects the content,
and how is it taught? What is teaching? What is learning? What
manner of relationship obtains between teaching and learning?
[What is popular knowledge, or knowledge gotten from living experi-
ence? Can we discard it as imprecise and confused? How may it be
gotten beyond, transcended? \What is a teacher? What is the role of
a teacher? And what is a student? What is a student’s role? If being
a teacher means being superior to the student in some way, does
this mean that the teacher must be authoritarian? Is it possible to
be democratic and dialogical without ceasing to be a teacher, which
is different from being a student? Does dialogue mean irrelevant
chitchat whose ideal atmosphere would be to “leave it as it is to see
if itll work’? Can there be a serious attempt at the reading and
writing of the word without a reading of the world? Does the ines-
capable criticism of a “banking” education mean the educator has
nothing to teach and ought not to teach? Is a teacher who does not
teach a self-contradiction? What is codification, and what is its role
in the framework of a theory of knowledge? How is the “relation
between practice and theory’ to be understood—and especially,
experienced—without the expression becoming trite, empty word-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 185

age? How is the “basistic,” voluntaristic temptation to be resisted—
and how is the intellectualistic, verbalistic temptation to engage in
sheer empty chatter to be overcome? How is one to “work on” the
relationship between language and citizenship?

[Jt is impossible to make education both a political practice and
a gnosiological one, fully, without the constant stimulus of these
questions, or without our constantly answering them.

Finally, I believe that the way I pose these questions in this book
implies my answers to them—answers that express the positions on
political pedagogy that I reaffirm in this book.

CHAPTER

ne day I received a phone call at my home in Geneva. It

was a Sunday morning, a very cold, cloudy morning, and

the French mountains you can see in the distance were
swathed in clouds. A typical Swiss January Sunday.

The call was from a Spanish guest worker, who asked if he and
two of his companions might drop in for an interview with me some
evening in the coming week. He told me they wanted to talk about
a children’s education program they had planned and were setting
up. He mentioned that they were reading Pedagogy of the Op-
pressed, and that they would like to talk about that too. “Who
knows,” he said, “—if you were to have time, and were interested,
we might meet more than once.”

We agreed on a day, and, at the scheduled time, they arrived with
certain documents and certain children’s exercises.

We chatted a bit about the climate, and the hard winter. They
told me about Spain and asked me about Brazil. Then they broached
the question that had brought us together. However, to be methodi-
cal, they had to introduce that question with an introduction ex-
plaining their political option, their activism. They spoke of their
experience as guest workers, of the restrictions on their right to have
their families with them to which so many of them were subjected, of
the obligation imposed on them, simply because they had been in
Switzerland for a year, to go back to Spain and renew (or fail to
renew) their privilege of spending another one-year term here the
following year.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE «- 137

This legal determination, besides relieving the Swiss government
of the burden of expenditures for education and health, not to men-
tion other considerations, obliged them to live in a state of constant
tension. Their vital insecurity was one more “why” for the “existen-
tial weariness’ I have talked about. They gave examples. Many of
their companions found themselves on an emotional roller coaster,
living in a present that, despite their now having the work that they
had been without in their own country, was a today with a doubtful,
too doubtful, tomorrow. It was a today in which, missing the love
and tenderness, as well as physical presence, of their families, they
found their activity, their strength, their resistance, all undermined.
Many among them, then, awash in “existential weariness” and “his-
torical anesthesia,” simply gravitated around their personal prob-
lems and concerns of the moment, unable to glimpse the “untested
feasibility” that lay beyond the “limited situation” in which they
found themselves immersed.* Hence also the difficulty of moving
them out of their “historical anesthesia,” which spawned a kind of
apathy, a kind of paralysis, when it came to a concern for or discus-
sion of political questions. Then, added to the “historical anesthesia’
in which so many of them were caught, there was the cultural,
political, and ideological climate of Switzerland, which was unfavor-
able to public political dissent. I remember how, just about the time
of the encounter of which I now speak, in reaction to a strike by
construction workers on a huge site in Geneva, an official or quasi-
official declaration was issued, in the guise of a union document,
denouncing the workers position, and deploring that “for the first
time in the history of Switzerland, and therefore in scant consonance
with the uses and customs of this country, they have had recourse
to force in order to have their demands met: they have had recourse
to a strike.” Obviously a notice like this was not very encouraging
to an effort to enable the guest workers to overcome their apathy and
participate in the political projects being conducted by their leaders.

On the contrary, the explicitly open nature of the letter condemn-
ing the strike reinforced in the guest workers the “historical anesthe-
sia’ of which I am speaking.

*For “limit situations’ and “untested feasibility,” see my Pedagogia do oprimido,
pp. 908.

138 - PAULO FREIRE

But from the viewpoint of the immigrant Spanish workers leader-
ship, the political reaction implied in the note appeared as a chal-
lenge, as well as a confirmation of their conviction as to the need
for their Spanish companions political training.

The pedagogical project they had come to me about was a special
one, and bore directly on their children—the sons and daughters of
those Spanish workers who, under Swiss law, could bring their fami-
lies with them from Spain. When you come right down to it, it
was a counterschool project. Their “school” would be established
precisely for the purpose of conducting an ongoing criticism of the
Swiss schools attended by the Spanish children. It would be a
“school” that would problematicize the Swiss school—render it
problematic in the eyes of the workers children.

The decade of the 1970s was just under way, and Althusserian
studies had burst upon the scene denouncing the school system as
an instrument for the reproduction of the dominant ideology (stud-
ies not always invulnerable to distortions and exaggerated interpre-
tations). I do not believe, as far as I can recall, that we made any
reference to the Althusserian theory of reproduction, but our con-
versation did basically turn on a critical understanding of the role
of the school, and of the role in the school that progressive or conser-
vative educators might play. In other words, the conversation bore
on the power of the dominant ideology, and how that power might
be blocked. And indeed, the program of which the Spanish workers
were speaking to me with such justifiable enthusiasm focused pre-
cisely on the Swiss schoo! their children were attending—Swiss
schooling in all its aspects. This is what they were planning to do,
and this is what they had come to speak with me about on that
evening.

These Spanish workers were planning to set up, alongside the
scholastic practice maintained by the Swiss school, in its particular
manner, in doing its own teaching, another school that would take
the Swiss school as the object of a critical analysis. A child could
attend their school only under one condition: he or she would have
to decide, after a short trial period, whether to continue to attend.
And classes would be held not every day, or for long periods of time,
but for only two hours or so at a time, and only three times a week.
Nor was the new school intended as a substitute for the Swiss school.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 139

It would complement it, through the experience of critical thinking
about the world. The Spanish workers who conversed with me that
evening were convinced of their children’s need to study seriously,
to learn, to create study habits, which, at least in part, they seemed
to be doing in the Swiss schools.

The children would spend the regular school day in the Swiss
schools, and then, on certain days, go to this other school, as well,
where they would “rethink” what they had learned or were learning.

The workers primary, overriding purpose was, on the one hand,
to diminish the risk of having to watch the alienation of their chil-
dren, cut off as these children were from their own culture—a risk
greatly intensified by the Swiss school, which was unquestionably
competent from the viewpoint of the dominant interests—and on
the other hand, to stimulate in the children a critical way of thinking,
as I now have brought out. Hence their project. Hence their sui
generis school, which would take the other one as the object of its
study, critically examine its practice, and analyze its curriculum—
not only in its explicit elements, but in its hidden ones, as well.

The educators in the “challenge school” would not always be the
same persons. Teachers would rotate, serving when they had free
time. They would be trained in occasional evening or weekend semi-
nars, in which they would rehearse their task.

They would also discuss with the children the ideology imbedded
in the books of children’s stories, whether or not these were being
used in the Swiss schools.

One of the stories they repeated to me, laughing with almost
childlike amusement, but critical of the ideology that permeated it,
told of the simple, happy family life of a family of pigs—a papa pig,
a mama pig, and three little piglets. The youngest piglet was always
getting into things, overcome with curiosity. He did not like routine.
He tried everything, and was always looking for something new
and different.

But nothing ever worked for him. His older siblings followed con-
vention to the letter, and got along fine. One autumn Sunday, under
a clear blue sky, the youngest piglet decided to set out for the day
and give his curiosity free rein. Nothing worked out. The moment
he stepped beyond established bounds, he was attacked by a little
dog. Wounded, and escaping by the skin of his teeth, he thought

140 - PAULO FREIRE

he saw another dog, and “poked the dog with a little stick.” The
“dog” turned out to be a swarm of bees. The poor little pig was all
but stung to death by the horrible, diabolical attack of the enraged
bees. From failure to failure he goes, returning home at nightfall
dejected and subdued, now without the courage to so much as think
of a new adventure. His commonsensical father was waiting for him,
and wisely tells him, with the benign air of a gentle pedagogue, “I
knew that you would do this some day. For you, there was no other
way to learn that we need not leave the beaten path. Try to change
something, and we run the risk of being hurt very painfully, as must
have happened to you today.”

Silent and contrite, the little pig listened to the “sensible” dis-
course of his well-behaved father.

It was against such a hamstringing suggestion, it was against pro-
grams like these, calculated to tame, that the Spanish workers chal-
lenging, questioning school was being created. They dreamed of an
open, democratic education, one that would instill in their children
a taste for questioning, a passion for knowledge, a healthy curiosity,
the joy of creating, and the pleasure of risk without which there can
be no creation.

Hence the community of views between Pedagogy of the Op-
pressed, about which we spoke in meetings we held after this one,
and the experience of the school in which children were taught to
question things.

Their reading of Pedagogy had confirmed the Spanish workers
in some of the pedagogical intuitions that had moved them to the
concretization of their experiment—the books whole analysis of
the dialectical relationship between oppressors and oppressed, of
the process of the introjection of the dominator by the dominated;
its reflections on a “banking” education and its authoritarianism, on
an education that challenges the status quo, on dialogue, on demo-
cratic initiatives; on the need, in a progressive educational process,
for educands to have their curiosity challenged; on the critical pres-
ence of educators and educands who, while teaching and learning
respectively, nevertheless all learn and teach, without any implica-
tion either that their relationship is one of homogeneous reciprocity,
or that the teacher does not learn and the learner does not teach.
All of this stimulated them, as I had been stimulated by reading

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 1]4l

Fanon and Memmi back in the days when I was putting the final
touches on Pedagogy.

Perhaps, in the process of their experience with Pedagogy of the
Oppressed—as they read of the educational practice to which I was
holding+-perhaps they felt the same emotion with which I was taken
when I plunged into The Wretched of the Earth and The Colonizer
and the Colonized—the satisfying sensation with which we are taken
when we find a confirmation of the “why” of the certitude we find
within ourselves]

The positive results they had achieved had led the parents of the
children of the questioning and challenging school—they had told
me in our meeting—to come to them and ask them to do something
like that for themselves, the parents, as well. They said they would
like another school, in which they would be able to discuss, together,
their presence in Switzerland, the political situation in Spain, and
sO on.

It had been by way of the implementation of the idea of a school
that would challenge their children’s school, that, now, the parents
had come for courses or seminars, or political training meetings. In
Geneva, the “game’ was no card game.

The following year—the year after I became acquainted with that
experiment in which these workers, turned educators, were calling
their children’s school in question and challenging them to think
critically, Claudius Ceccon, the remarkable Brazilian cartoonist,
then residing in Geneva, recounted to me the following case, that
of his son Flavio.

One day, dejected and hurt, Flévio had told him that his teacher
had torn up one of his drawings. At home, Flavio had learned free-
dom of expression, and was gradually encouraged to use it more and
more, as he grew up exercising his curiosity in a climate of respect
and affection. Curiosity was not forbidden. And so Flavio creativity
enjoyed the necessary conditions of self-expression. He could not
understand why in the world his teacher would destroy one of his
drawings! That had offended him deeply, nor had he been the only
one to take offense. It had been as if his teacher had ripped up a
little piece of himself. After all, his drawing was a creation of his,
was it not? Had it not deserved as much respect as a story or a
poem he might have written?

142 + PAULO FREIRE

As any father or mother would have done who had embraced a
democratic option and whose behavior was consistent with that op-
tion, Claudius went to the teacher to talk about what had happened.

The teacher had a high regard for the child. She spoke of him in
terms of high praise, emphasizing his talent and his capacity for
freedom.

As Claudius watched the teacher, he noticed by her gestures by
her tone of voice that it could never have entered her head that he
had come to voice his disapproval of what she had done to Flavio's
drawing—for that matter, his disapproval of what she had done to
Flavio himself, with his creativity that she had all but torn to shreds.

Delighted at a visit from the parent of one of her students whom
she genuinely admired, she paced back and forth, fairly skipping,
speaking of her class activities.

Claudius listened, and followed her narratives, awaiting an oppor-
tunity to speak with her about what had happened. His rage had
abated now. He was calmer.

All of a sudden the teacher showed Claudius a series of nearly
identical drawings. The drawings were all of a black cat—a single
cat, multiplied, with the alteration of some trait here or there.

“What do you think of that?” the teacher asked, and without
waiting for an answer, exclaimed, “My students did these. I brought
them a little statue of a cat for them to draw.”

“Why not bring a live cat into the classroom—one that would
walk and run, and jump?” Claudius asked. “Then the children would
draw the cat as they understood it, as they perceived it. The children
would actually reinvent the cat. They would be free to make any cat
they felt like. They would be free to create, to invent and reinvent. ”

“No, no!” the teacher fairly shouted. “Perhaps that might do for
your child. Perhaps. I don't know, but perhaps with him that might
do, for Flavio, with his lively, intelligent, free spirit. But what about
the others? I remember how I was when I was a child,” the teacher
went on. ‘I was terrified in situations where I felt obliged to choose,
decide, create. That's why a few days ago I took a drawing away from
Flavio,” she said, euphemistically, referring to its destruction at her
hands. He had drawn a cat that couldnt exist. A cat of all different
impossible colors. I couldnt accept his drawing. It would have been

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 143

harmful not only to him but to the others, too—even more harmful
to them than to him.”

And that, it appeared, was the way the entire school functioned.
It was not merely that one educator who shook with fear at the very
mention of freedom, creation, adventure, risk. For the whole school,
as for her, the world should not change, and just as in the story of
the little pig, we ought never to leave the beaten path, or deviate
from the established norm, in our passage through this world. Walk
in the footsteps others have left for us. Lo, our lot and destiny.

Blaze trails as we go? Re-create the world, transform it? Never!

It was because of incidents like this, along with other, more seri-
ous occurrences, that the Spanish guest workers had created their
school—the school that called their children’s other school, the
Swiss school, into question.

Of the memories that I retain of facts and events, over the course
of the seventies, which were closely connected with Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, there are moments that I shall never forget, so vivid
and vital do they remain in my recollection.

Just now I am speaking of various encounters I had in Geneva—
whether in my office at the World Council of Churches, or in the
apartment we had in Grand Lancy—with intellectuals, teachers,
students, religious, blacks, whites from South Africa. During the
1970s, rarely did a month go past that someone, a native of South
Africa or at least someone who lived there and was passing through
Geneva, did not come to speak with me of the tragic, absurd, un-
thinkable experience of racism.

Rare too was the occasion, in those days, when I did not have a
conversation with a woman or man, white or black, of South Africa—
on her or his way to the United States—on the same subjects as
those of my other meetings in Geneva, as well as on different issues.

Rarely did much time pass between occasions when the phone
would ring and I would pick it up to hear, “I landed in Geneva two
days ago. I’m flying to South Africa tonight. I knew itd be too risky
for me to take Pedagogy of the Oppressed into the country with me,
so I spent all last night reading it. Could I talk to you today, before
I leave?” Naturally I never said no. I postponed other meetings,
canceled interviews, changed agendas, but never said no to any of
those requests. Headache, upset stomach, bad mood, weariness,

144 - PAULO FREIRE

homesickness for Brazil, reading to do, writing to do, no such reason
could make me say no to any of these requests whatsoever. In the
face of the emotional, and not only political, need with which they
were accompanied in the one making the request, all such consid-
erations became secondary ones. They carried no weight with me
as an argument for refusing a meeting that, at times, was requested
for a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning.

The very moment someone asked on the phone whether he or
she might come and consult with me, I felt the importance and
urgency of the meeting so powerfully that I needed it as much as
the one asking for it. I would have been frustrated myself, had I
refused it.

My rebellion against every kind of discrimination, from the most
explicit and crying to the most covert and hypocritical, which is no
less offensive and immoral, has been with me from my childhood.
Since as far back as I can remember, I have reacted almost instinct-
ively against any word, deed, or sign of racial discrimination, or, for
that matter, discrimination against the poor, which, quite a bit later,
I came to define as class discrimination.

The evidence I heard from South Africans, white or black, in
Geneva or in the United States, shocked me, and continues to shock
me today when I recall it, as I am doing now. The brutality of racism
is something beyond what a minimum of human sensitivity can en-
counter without trembling, and saying, “Horrible!”

I have heard from South African whites, or whites living in South
Africa, who are as revulsed as I, who are as antiracist as I, traumatic
accounts of unthinkable discriminatory practices. And from blacks
as well. “I'm not allowed to say, “My God,” a young black church
person told me, to my dismay and near incredulity at what I was
hearing. “I have to say, ‘Your God.’”

Blacks and whites, South Africans or residents of South Africa,
with whom I conversed usually spoke of relations between oppres-
sors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized, whiteness and black-
ness, employing theoretical elements common to Fanon, Memmi,
and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. They were especially interested in
discussing how to attack concrete situations, and how, through an
in-depth approach to the “why” or “whys” of the sense of being
crushed that the popular classes have of themselves, they might

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 145

revise their earlier perceptions. In other words, they wanted to learn
how to perceive their old perception of reality and adopt a new
apprehension of the world, but without this meaning that, by reason
of being perceived differently, the world were suddenly transformed.
It meant that{ on the basis of a new apprehension of the world, it
would be possible to acquire the disposition to change it!

[ Today, I fear that some men and women, rightly disturbed, some
intellectuals in revolt who sought me out in those days, may now be
among those who have allowed themselves to be tamed by a certain
high-sounding neoliberal discourse. They may have been won to the
cause of those who find that, when all is said and done, “This is the
way it is, this is how history is, this is how life is. The competent
run things and make a profit, and create the wealth that, at the right
moment, will “trickle down” to the have-nots more or less equitably.
The discourse upon and in favor of social justice no longer has mean-
ing, and if we continue to hold that discourse in this “new history”
of ours, we shall be mounting obstacles to the natural process in
which it is the capable who make and remake the world. Among
these persons are to be found those who declare that we no longer
have any need today of a militant education, one that tears the mask
from the face of a lying dominant ideology; that what we need today
is a neutral education, heart and soul devoted to the technical train-
ing of the labor foree—dedicated to the transmission of content in
all the emaciation of its technicity and scientism. But that’s the
old discourse!

These visits from South Africans or residents of South Africa,
with their expressions of justifiable anger and necessary indignation,
were contemporaneous with my first visit to Africa—to Zambia and
Tanzania, once again in connection with Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I was to stop over in Zambia, where I would hold a week-long
seminar in Kitwe, in a center for theological studies, Mindolo Ecu-
menical Foundation, then I would go on to Tanzania, for another
seminar, at the University of Dar es Salaam. In both encounters,
discussion would turn on Pedagogy, which was central to the “why”
of the invitations I had been extended. While I was changing planes
in Lusaka for a local flight to Kitwe, I was summoned to the “meeting
area” on the airport public address system. Waiting for me there I
found a young North American couple, whom I had met, I believe,

146 - PAULO FREIRE

in Boston, two or three years before. They were working in Zambia
as volunteers, and had very good relations with the leadership of
the MLA, the Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

We greeted each other with an embrace, and they asked me
whether I could stay in Lusaka that day, and fly to Kitwe the next.
The MLA team in Lusaka would like a conversation with me on
problems of education and struggle, literacy programs in liberated
areas, and so on. If I should accept, my friends told me, they would
see to flight arrangements and advise the theological center in
Kitwe.

By one oclock that afternoon I was having lunch in the young
couple’s home with the MLA leaders, headed by Licio Lara, who
within a few years would be second in the Angolan government and
chief of the party's political bureau.

We spent an afternoon and night of work, using some documen-
tary films to flesh out our conversations.

Lara started us off with a realistic report on the status of the
liberation struggle, then we went back and forth about the educa-
tional practice to be applied during the struggle itself. We dwelt on
an analysis of how to take advantage of the need for sheer survival
in the struggle by turning that need to account in the discovery of
more effective and more rigorous means or procedures than, for
example, benziduras (spells) or simple talismans. But in no wise,
not even here, where going beyond commonsense knowledge was a
matter of life and death, would it be legitimate to belittle that knowl-
edge or look down on it. It must be respected.{A transcendence of
commonsense knowledge, I was already in Pheak in those days,
must be achieved only by way of that very knowledge.\

Indeed, this was a conception dear to the heart of Amilcar Cabral,
the great African leader who, alongside others, inspired the libera-
tion movements in what are now the former Portuguese colonies: a
more rigorous empowerment of his comrades through seminars in
which they would be authentically trained and their methods evalu-
ated, which he would conduct on his visits to the battle front. Ca-
bral’s objective was to overcome what he called culture weaknesses
or debilities. He put it this way:

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 147

Let no one imagine that the officers of the revolutionary forces
approve the notion that, if we carry a talisman in our belt, we
shall not die in battle. No, we shall not die in battle if we do not
wage war or attack the enemy from a position of weakness. If we
make mistakes, if we are in a position of weakness, we shall
certainly die. There is no way around that. You can tell me a
string of stories that you have in your heads: “Cabral doesnt
know. We've seen cases where it was the talisman that snatched
our comrades from the jaws of death. The bullets were headed
right for them, and they turned around and ricocheted back the
other way.” You can say that. But I have hope that our children’s
children, when they hear that, will be glad that PAIGEC [African
Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] was able
to wage the struggle in accordance with the reality of their
land—and not have to say, “Our grandparents fought really hard,
but they believed in superstitions.” This conversation may mean
nothing to you now. I'm talking about the future. But I have
certitude that the majority understand what I say, and know I
am right. *

Interspersing our conversation with documentaries, we also dis-
cussed, at length, the question of literacy, and the imperative need
that the struggle itself, as a process, enjoined upon its leadership:
that they bend serious efforts to this end—in terms of activists
technical training, of course, with a view to the progress of the
struggle, and to the use of more modern and more sophisticated
weapons, which could require more sophisticated knowledge on the
part of the activists. Simultaneously with this kind of preparation,
however, should come the activists political training. These persons,
in the framework of Cabral’s critical understanding, ought always to
be armed militants—activists, yes, military never.

Years later, I had the opportunity to continue some of these con-
versations with Lticio Lara, in Luanda, when he was working as
chief of the party's Political Bureau, and when, at his invitation and
that of the minister of education in Angola then, the poet Anténio
Jacinto, who had spent seven years in the colonial dungeons, I

*Amilcar Cabral, Obras escolhidas, vol. 1, Arma da teoria, p. 141.

a

148 - PAULO FREIRE

worked as a consultant to his ministry through the World Council
of Churches.

That meeting in Lusaka left a deep mark on me. The same is true
of my meeting in Dar es Salaam with the FRELIMO (Mozambique
Liberation Front) leaders, at the Formation Campus for leaders and
administrators, a short distance outside Dar in a lovely location
placed at the disposal of the front by the Tanzanian government.
Finally, I was invited to hold a dialogue with experienced activists
currently engaged in the struggle and therefore having no time for
woolgathering or intellectual tours de force. What they wanted was
to dive into a critical, theoretical reflection with me on their prac-
tice, their struggle, as a “cultural fact and a factor of culture” (Cabral,
1976). Their confidence in me as a progressive intellectual was genu-
inely important to me. They did not criticize me for citing a peasant
along with Marx. Nor did they regard me as a bourgeois educator
because I maintained the importance of the role of consciousness
in history.

That was a satisfaction. I, a thinker in the field of educational
practice, had been understood by activists currently caught up in
their struggle, and had been invited to hold a dialogue with them
precisely concerning that struggle, sometimes an armed one and
sometimes not. It was a satisfaction that accompanied me all through
the seventies, and that has accompanied me to this very day, most
recently in my visit to El Salvador, of which I speak at the end of
this book. The same was true of my journey through all of the former
Portuguese colonies (with the sole exception of Mozambique), my
trips to Tanzania, my conversations with President Nyerere, in
which we discussed “education as self-reliance” and Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, my sojourns in Nicaragua, Grenada (that lovely Carib-
bean island that was the victim of an invasion), my encounter with
Cuba. But along with the satisfaction of these encounters came the
joy of so many others, at the four corners of the earth, with progres-
sive folk who dreamt the possible dream of changing the world. And
almost always, Pedagogy of the Oppressed had preceded me in these
corners of the earth, in some sense paving the way for my own
arrival there.

I remember writing, during my nights in Africa, in Kitwe, in Dar

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 149

es Salaam, a harsh, strong report of my visit. My report transcribed
stories I had heard from Africans from the period preceding the
independence of Zambia or Tanzania, and I myself wrote of the
cruel marks of colonialism and racism.

“A few years ago,” a Tanzanian professor told me as we walked
into the bar of the hotel where I was staying in Dar, “I wouldnt
have been able to walk into this bar like this. Things were different.
The warnings posted along our beaches were unbelievable: “Blacks
and Dogs Prohibited, “Blacks and Dogs Prohibited.’” My friend
from the University of Dar was murmuring these words, softly, in a
kind of singsong, facing me across the table in the bar, as if by
repeating the offensive words of the shameful sign, he were some-
how expressing the righteous wrath of women and men the world
over in the face of the outrage represented by racism.

Afterwards I strolled along the beach with him—the beach that
had once been off-limits for him, and accessible only to whites. His
“genetic inferiority,’ according to the “science” of a professor who
“coincidentally” was white, counterindicated that his Negro feet
tread those white areas, and that his Negro body “pollute” the blue
waters of his own sea. “Blacks and Dogs Prohibited,” he kept whis-
pering, as we left the beach and headed for his house for dinner.

There are no such signs posted on the beaches of Tanzania. But
racism is alive and well, crushing, shredding people's lives, and
besmirching the world.

As Patrick Lekota, Popo Molefe’s comrade—two extraordinary
black South African leaders—put it in a letter to a friend:

Today we are receiving judgment. Earlier on I had some anxiety
for my family. All my years are going to our struggle, and the
question must cross their minds as to whether I still remember
my obligations toward them. But now, all that has suddenly
changed into unbridled rage with this system of South African
law. This past week, an Afrikaner bully, Jacobus Vorster, was
fined [$1,200] for tying an African laborer to a tree and beating
him to death. He was then released to go back to his farm with
an order that he pay the widow [$43] per month for five years.
The laborer (deceased) had accidentally killed Vorster’s one dog

150 - PAULO FREIRE

and injured another one. ... African life remains extremely
cheap in this country.*

So here is an instance of racism. But it is only one out of millions
of such violent, shameful, absurd instances.

Between January 3 and mid-February 1973, at the invitation of
the religious leaders associated with the World Council of Churches,
I visited twelve states of the United States. On that pilgrimage I
found myself together with countless educators. Once more with
Pedagogy of the Oppressed as mediator, I discussed their practice
with them, seeking to understand it critically in its given context.
Not always, let it be said in passing, were the groups in agreement
with the analyses I made of certain components of their historico-
social context. But none of the divergencies—even when they bore
on substantive issues, as we shall see below—rendered inviable a
generally rich, dynamic dialogue.

Working from an ecumenical perspective, the team responsible
for the study days had contacted the various groups of social workers,
scattered throughout the twelve states, who wished to be included
in these seminars, and set up with them a coordinating committee
to arrange the calendar of meetings.

On weekdays I met with groups, or leaders of movements that,
although they declined to join church groups for the process, were
not thereby excluded from the same.

On weekends, in a city of one of the states in which I was working,
a larger seminar would be held, with upwards of seventy partici-
pants. The main lines and themes of the discussions had been set
down minutely and in advance. For the last weekend, representa-
tives of the twelve seminars crowded together for an evaluation
meeting in New York, whose framework had been constituted from
the reports of each of the twelve seminars.

As I have said, beginning in 1967 I visted the United States regu-
larly, participating in meetings and giving talks, even apart from the
time I lived in Cambridge, at 371 Broadway (nearly a year). But
never had I been exposed in such systematic, direct contact with

*Rose Moss, “Shouting at the Crocodile,” in Popo Molefe, Patrick Lekota and
the Freeing of South Africa (Beacon Press, 1990).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - I5]

the complex and highly technologized reality of North America.
Those forty-five days challenged me to the maximum, and taught
me a great deal. I relearned things I had learned before, obvious
things like the fact that oneness in difference will be the only effec-
tive response of those forbidden to be, those prevented from living,
to the ancient rule of the mighty: divide and conquer. Without unity
in diversity, the so-called minorities could not even struggle, in the
United States, for the most basic (and therefore the “least,” if we
may so say) rights, let alone overcome the barriers that keep them
from “being themselves,” from being “minorities for themselves,”
with one another and not against one another.

The first time I made this statement on unity in diversity was in
one of the weekend seminars of which I have just spoken. It was at
a seminar in Chicago. It had begun in the morning, in the hotel
where Elza and I had been put up, and where I had one of the
most concrete experiences of discrimination I have ever had. We
were sitting in the restaurant having breakfast. The waiters were
going back and forth, taking care of customers to our right, to our
left, in front of us, and at some tables a little way behind us, but
passing us by as if we did not exist, or were under the effect of one
of those marvelous science-fiction drugs that make you invisible.

It was an experience of discrimination that I shall never forget.
And the reason why I shall never forget it is precisely that, after all
the years I had lived without having it happen to me, it was suddenly
happening to me. Deep down inside, I realized, I had not conceived
of myself as a possible object of discrimination. Of course, this beto-
kened a lack of humility on my part, to say the least.

We went without breakfast, even though (after my righteous pro-
tests, and the explosion of my no less righteous anger, softened a
bit by Elza’s more gentle manner) we left the restaurant to the
accompaniment of the profuse apologies of the manager on duty,
who was as racist as the waiters.

The hour was upon us: the seminar was scheduled to begin in a
few moments. So we went to a cafe on the corner for an orange
juice and a cup of coffee.

And so I walked into the big auditorium, where the participants
had been waiting. I felt burdened—with a kind of sorrow, a great
deal of anger, and a sense of helplessness, along with a little hunger,

152 + PAULO FREIRE

not to mention a hefty dose of frustration at not having my favorite
American breakfast: “eggs up and a toasted English.”

The coordinator opened the meeting. Then, one by one, the lead-
ers of each of the various groups stood up and said, “Were black,
and wed like to meet just among ourselves.” Or, “Were Indians.
We'd like to be by ourselves.” Or, “Were Mexican Americans, and
wed like a room to talk.” Then, his voice ringing with sarcasm, a
young black pointed at a group of whites and said: “This is the ‘other’
group!” The whites had been silent. And silent they remained.

In relations between blacks and whites, if I am not completely
mistaken, there seems to be, on the part of many whites who do
not regard themselves as racists, something that encumbers them
in their dealings with blacks, and prevents them from mounting an
authentic battle against racism. Here is what I mean. It seems—at
least to me—that whites have strong guilt feelings with regard to
blacks. And if there is anything that annoys those who suffer dis-
crimination, it is to have someone dealing with them in a guilty
tone. The presence of this feeling of guilt suggests, at the least, the
existence of vestiges of the actual “why’ of the guilt: in this case,
traces of the preconception itself. Here is the reason for the posture
of accommodation adopted by so many whites in the way they be-
have in situations like the one just described. What I mean to say
is this. In my relations with blacks, with Chicanos, with gays and
lesbians, with homeless persons, with workers white or black, there
is no need for me to treat them paternalistically, brimming over
with guilt. What I ought to be doing is discussing and debating
things with them, disagreeing with them, as new comrades, or at
least as possible comrades-to-be, comrades in the battle, companions
along the way.

Actually, what the rejected ones need—those forbidden to be,
prevented from being—is not our tepidity but our warmth, our
solidarity—yes, and our love, but an unfeigned love, not a mis-
trustful one, not a soppy love, but an “armed” love, like the one of
which poet Thiago de Melo tells.*°

It was precisely amidst the silence that ensued among after the
various “minority” leaders had claimed the right to isolation, that I
spoke up.

“I respect your position,” I said,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 153

but I am convinced that the more the so-called minorities accept
themselves as such, and close off from one another, the sounder
the only real minority—the dominant class—will sleep. All
through history, among the many self-proclaimed rights of
power, power has always arrogated the right, as an intrinsic con-
dition of its very being, to paint the portrait of those who have
no power. And the picture the powerful paint of the powerless,
to be incarnated by them, obviously will reinforce the power of
those who have power, by reason of which they do their portrait
painting. The colonized could never have been seen and por-
trayed by the colonizers as cultivated, capable, intelligent per-
sons worthy of their liberty, or, for example, as the producers of
a language that, because it is a language, advances and changes
and grows historico-socially. On the contrary, the colonized will
have to be barbarous, uncultured, “nonhistorical” persons—until
the arrival of the colonizers, who ‘bring them history. They
speak dialects, not languages, fated never to express “scientific
truth,” or “the mysteries of transcendence,’ or the “loveliness of
the world.”

Generally speaking, the powerless, in the early moments of
their historical experience, accept the sketch the powerful draw
of them. They have no other picture of themselves than the one
imposed on them. One of the signs of nonconformism on the
part of the powerless is rebellion against the portraits created of
them by the powerful.

The so-called minorities, for example, need to realize that,
when all is said and done, they are the majority. The path to
their self-acceptance as the majority lies in concentrating on the
similarities among themselves, and not only the differences, and
thus creating unity in diversity, apart from which I fail to see
how they can improve themselves, or even build themselves a
substantial, radical democracy.

My discourse annoyed some of those present. “That's white talk,”
said the young black leader, lifting his index finger solemnly and
looking daggers at me.

“No, this isn’t white talk,” I said. “It's intelligent, clear-sighted,
progressive talk, and it could have been uttered by a black man, a
black woman, a blue-eyed Irishman, a Chicano, anybody at all, as
long as theyre progressive. The only person who cant do this kind
of talk is somebody whose self-interest would be served by the

154 - PAULO FREIRE

maintenance of the status quo. The only person who cannot logically
speak in this way is a racist. Of course, it may be that, historically,
right now, for any number of reasons, it is impossible to attain this
oneness in difference. It may be, for example, that the grass roots
of each ‘minority’ have not matured as yet, or have not sufficiently
matured, to accept dialogue, accept ‘being with’ one another (or,
more likely, their leaders have not). That's something else again.
But to say that ‘unity in diversity is ‘white talk? No, that’s not right.”

The groups had divided up and isolated themselves. They held
their discussions and arrived at various conclusions on certain
problems.

CHAPTER

6

hen the seminar was over, I took advantage of the fact

that the matter had come up, and talked about it again.

I insisted that, on the journey in quest of unity in diver-
sity—a long, difficult, but completely necessary journey—the “mi-
norities’ (who, once more, are ultimately the majority) at odds with
the majority have a great deal to learn.

After all, no one walks without learning to walk—without learning
to walk by walking, without learning to remake, to retouch, the
dream for whose cause the walkers have set off down the road. And
I have heard tell of this again just recently, so long after that Saturday
morning in Chicago. This is what the current leader of the serin-
gueiros among the Rain Forest Peoples—Osmarino Amancio, one
of the disciples of Chico Mendes, recently the victim of a cowardly
assassination— spoke of recently in ECO-Rio 92, with such candor
and energy. His words, and the emphasis with which he uttered
them in the presence of Chief Ianomami, reminded me of that semi-
nar in Chicago.

“In the beginning,” Amancio declared, “we believed the story we
were told by the mighty—that the Indians were our enemies. The
Indians, on their side, manipulated by these same mighty ones,
believed them as well—that we were their enemies. As time went
by, we discovered that our differences should never be the reason
for our killing one another on behalf of the interests of the mighty.
We discovered that we were all ‘Rain Forest People, and that we

156 - PAULO FREIRE

have always desired only one thing around which we could unite: the
rain forest. Today,” he concluded, “we are a unity in our differences.

There is another learning process, another apprenticeship, of ex-
ceeding importance, but exceedingly difficult, especially in highly
complex societies like that of North America. I mean the process of
learning that a critical comprehension of the so-called minorities of
one’s culture is not exhausted in questions of race and sex, but
requires a comprehension of the class division in that culture, as
well. In other ie does not explain everything. Nor does
race. |Nor does class. Racial discrimination is by no manner of means
reducible to a problem of class. Neither is sexism. Without a refer-
ence to the division between the classes, however, I, for one, fail to
understand either phenomenon—racial discrimination or sexual—in
its totality, or even that against the “minorities” in themselves. Besides
skin color, or sex differentiation, ideology, too, has its “color.”

Cultural pluralism is another serious problem that ought to be
subjected to this kind of analysis. Cultural pluralism does not consist
of a simple juxtaposition of cultures, and still less is it the prepotent
might of one culture over another Cultural pluralism consists in the
realization of freedom, in the guaranteed right of each culture to
move in mutual respect, each one freely running the risk of bein
different, fearless of being different, each culture being “for itself
They need the opportunity to grow together, but preferably not in
the experience of an ongoing tension provoked by the almightiness
of one culture vis-a-vis all the others, which latter would all be
“forbidden to be.”

The needed ongoing tension, among cultures in a cultural plural-
ism, is of a different nature. The tension that is needed is the tension
to which the various cultures expose themselves by being different,
in a democratic relationship in which they strive for advancement.

he tension of which the cultures have need in a multicultural soci-
ety is the tension of not being able to escape their self-construction,
their self-creation, their self-production, with their every step in the
direction precisely of a cultural pluralism, which will never be fin-
ished and comple: he tension in this case, therefore, is that of
the “unfinishedness’ that each culture accepts as the raison détre
of its very search and self-concern,} the why of its nonantagonistic
conflicts—conflicts ungenerated by fear, by prideful arrogance, by

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 157

“existential weariness,” by “historical anesthesia,” nor, again, by an
explosion of vengeance, by desperation in the face of an injustice
that seems to go on forever.

We must also realize that the society to whose space other ethnic
groups, for economic, social, and historical reasons, have come, to
be “adsorbed” here in a subordinate relationship, has its dominant
class, its class culture, its language, its syntax, its class semantics,
its tastes, its dreams, its ends—its projects, values, and historical
programs. The society to whose space other ethnic groups have
come has its dreams, projects, values, and language that the domi-
nant class not only defends as its own—and since they are its own,
calls them “national’—but also therefore “offers” to the others (along
any number of paths, among them the school), and will not take no
for an answer. There is no genuine bilingualism, therefore, let alone
multilingualism, apart from a “multiculturality,” and no multicul-
turality arises spontaneously. [A multiculturality must be created,
politically produced, worked on, in the sweat of one’s brow, in con-
crete history.

Hence the need, once more, for the invention of unity in diversity.
The very quest for this oneness in difference, the struggle for it as
a process, in and of itself is the beginning of a creation of multicul-
turality. Let us emphasize once more: multiculturality as a phenome-
non involving the coexistence of different cultures in one and the
same space is not something natural and spontaneous. It is a histori-
cal creation, involving decision, political determination, mobiliza-
tion, and organization, on the part of each cultural group, in view
of common purposes. Thus, it calls for a certain educational practice,
one that will be consistent with these objectives. It calls for a new
ethics, founded on respect for differences.

In the early stages, the struggle for unity in diversity, which is
obviously a political struggle, means mobilizing and organizing all
the various cultural forces—without ignoring the class rift—and
bringing these forces to bear on a broadening, a deepening, a tran-
scending of a pure, laissez-faire democracy. We must adopt that
democratic radicalness for which it is not enough merrily to pro-
claim that in this or that society man and woman enjoy “equal free-
dom,” meaning the right to starve, have no schools to send their

158 - PAULO FREIRE

children to, and be homeless—so, the right to live in the street, the
right not to be taken care of in old age, the right simply not to be.

It is imperative that we get beyond societies whose structures
beget an ideology that ascribes responsibility for the breakdowns
and failures actually created by these same structures to the failed
themselves, as individuals, instead of to the structures of these socie-
ties or to the manner in which these societies function) If black
urchins do not learn English well it is their own fault! It is due to
their “genetic” incompetency, and not to the racial or class discrimi-
nation to which they are subjected, not to the authoritarian elitism
that presumes to impose a “cultural standard’—an elitism that ulti-
mately goes perfectly hand in hand with a complete disrespect for
popular knowledge and popular speech. It is the same thing as oc-
curs in Brazil. The little boys and girls of the hill and gully country
fail to learn because they are born incompetent.

These were some of the subjects discussed in the study day of
which I speak.

In the case of most of the positions I held in those days, and still
hold, the reaction was not long in coming.

The worst thing would have been a well-behaved silence, conceal-
ing the discord. It was a good thing that the various groups—most
of them, at any rate, expressed themselves, no matter that it have
been against my view of the facts and problems.

Things have not changed a great deal between 1973 and 1994,
when it comes to an all but systematic refusal on the part of antiracist
and antisexist movements, even serious movements, to admit the
concept of social class into a comprehensive analysis either of racism
and sexism themselves, or of the struggle against them] And the
same is true for the struggle against the thesis of unity in diversity.

Recently a university professor, black, female, a friend of mine, a
serious, competent scholar, in conversation with me, my wife Nita,
and Professor Donaldo Macedo, in Boston, vehemently denied any
relationship between social classes and racism.

We listened to her, she listened to us, we listened to each other
respectfully, as I listened in 1973 to those who who said no to my
analyses.

If she had been offended by us, or we by her—because, for us,
even though racism is not reduced to social class, we cannot under-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 159

stand the former without the latter, while for my friend this is not
the case—had we offended each other, we would have fallen into a
sectarian position as reprehensible as the racism we were execrating.

Even more recently, in July of this year, I experienced tough
resistance on the part of a group of competent intellectuals, mostly
of Mexican or Puerto Rican origin, in California, to the possible
dream, the necessary utopia, of transcending this almost invincible
taste for shutting oneself up in a ghetto, and moving on to the
political invention of unity in diversity. On this occasion, too, my
interlocutors extended their reaction to or rejection of the category
of class to any analysis of North American reality.

Between sessions in the seminar I delighted in the reading of
Manning Marabele.*

Another study day, with its unforgettable moments, marked my
first visit to the Caribbean, with a program of meetings and discus-
sions held on various islands, starting in Jamaica.

And on all the islands, with an occasional exception, the seminars
were planned and coordinated by organizations working in popular
regions in an advisory capacity on behalf of social movements on
various levels and in various areas.

Once more, a reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the appli-
cation of some of its suggestions nearly always occasioned a discus-
sion of matters in which I was confronted with identical problems,
if “clothed” in different “trappings. ”

In the interest of brevity, I have selected three of the richer mo-
ments of my voyage, and I shall concentrate on them.

The first is connected with my being forbidden to enter Haiti, in
whose capital I was to hold one of the seminars to discuss literacy
and postliteracy programs.

In Geneva, through the World Council of Churches, I had ob-
tained an entry visa for Haiti. Upon arriving in Kingston, however,
I was informed by program organizers that Haitian authorities had
informed them that I was prohibited from entering the country.
So they had switched the seminar from Haiti to the Dominican
Republic.

*Manning Marabele, The Crisis of Color and Democracy: Essays on on Race,
Class and Power (Monroe, Maine: Common Conrage Press, 1992).

160 - PAULO FREIRE

It will be worthwhile here more to underscore the attitudes of
arbitrary power—of fear of freedom (and anger with freedom), of a
horror of culture, of contempt for thought in the authoritarian and
unpopular regimes—than for any other reason. It helps to under-
stand just how it came about that I was prevented from entering
Haiti in those days. I was told that, upon learning of the seminar
coordinators request that I enter the country, the national authori-
ties, perhaps out of sympathy with the Brazilian military regime,
decided to consult our embassy in Port-au-Prince.

The response, according to the same source, was a categorical
“No.” Obviously I can prove none of this, but none of it is very
significant in comparison with the absurd pressure that, during the
military regime, which called itself serious, democratic, and pure,
was exerted not only against me, but against so many other Brazil-
ians in exile. The first honorary doctorates that I received were
bestowed in spite of ridiculous pressures put on the universities not
to bestow them. My trip to UNESCO under FAO auspices occa-
sioned incredibly flimsy and disgustingly petty reactions on the part
of the military government then in power in Brazil.

After a great deal of pressure by my first wife, Elza, on the Brazil-
ian consulate in Geneva, where she insisted on her own right and
that of her minor children to carry the passport whose renewal
had been denied them more than three years before, the Brazilian
government then in power ordered that they be issued a document
valid only for Switzerland, as if they had needed a passport to travel
from Geneva to Zurich! I frequently referred, in the outside world,
to the “creativity” of the Brazilian Foreign Affairs Ministry in this
matter. It all came down to national diplomacy’s having invented a
“stay-in-port,” with which it “took the wind out of the sails” of the
life of less dangerous exiles!

The interesting thing is that Elza traveled with me through part
of the world with her “stay-in-port.” In the airports, the police care-
fully scrutinized that diplomatic anomaly, smiled, and stamped it,
thereby manifesting their acceptance not only of the “stay-in-port”
but of the human person who used it.

Let us return to our case.

As I was prevented from entering Haiti, another meeting had
been arranged instead, in the Dominican Republic. It was to be

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - Il16l

with a popular education group, under Catholic auspices. Twenty to
twenty-five educators wished to discuss with me, in particular, the
question of the Generative Thematic, the actual programming of
programmatic content, and my criticism of “banking” education.
Heading toward the Dominican Republic, we made a stop in Port-
au-Prince. I was traveling with a United Nations technologist and a
Jamaican educator. For technical reasons, the flight to the Domini-
can Republic would not leave for three more hours. And so my
friend the United Nations technologist telephoned a friend of his,
who quickly came to the airport to drive us around the city.

I entered the country under prohibition from doing so, with my
Swiss document inserted beneath my friend’s passport. It was a
blue passport, which, by “bluing” my own, preserved me from
examination.

The little city struck me. Especially all the popular artists, who
displayed their paintings in various corners of the squares. Their
pictures were full of color, and spoke of the life of their people, the
pain of their people, the joy of their people. It was the first time
that, in the face of such loveliness, such artistic creativity, such a
quantity of colors, I felt as if I were, as indeed I was, faced with a
multiplicity of discourses on the part of the people(” It was if the
Haitian popular classes, forbidden to be, forbidden to read, to write,
spoke or made their discourse of protest, of denunciation and proc-
lamation, through art, the sole manner of discourse they were
permitte

( By painting, they not only supported themselves and their fami-
lies, but also supported, maintained, within themselves, possibly
without knowing it, the desire to be c

Some time ago, I conceived a huge desire to return to Haiti,
legally, during the tenure of the elected, democratic government
that has recently been overthrown by one more adventurer bent on
defacing his world and imprisoning his people. Now, with this be-
trayal of the Haitian people, it is no longer possible. It is a pity that
we have come to the end of the century, and the end of the millen-
nium, still running the historical risk of suffering these cowardly
coups against freedom, against democracy, against the right to be.
Once again the dominant minority, invested with the economic and
political power upon which their firepower, their destructive vio-

162 PAULO FREE
lence, rests, crushes the popular majorities in Haiti. Defenseless,
these latter return to silence and immobility. Perhaps they will
plunge into the popular arts—their festivals, their music, the very
rhythm of their bodies. These things they must never renounce, and
now they are an expression of their resistance, as well.

Little did I imagine, as I headed for the Dominican Republic,
what awaited me there.

As a Brazilian citizen, I had not applied for an entry visa, since
none was required by the Dominican regime then in power. The
problem was that I did not even have my Brazilian “do-not-
pass-port.” I only had a Swiss travel document.

For the police at the airport, I was not Brazilian, I was a Swiss.
And the Swiss needed a visa. As I had none, I was prohibited from
entering. I was escorted, and none too politely, to “Departures” to
reboard my plane, which would now go on to Puerto Rico.

My friend the United Nations technologist left the boarding area
for the reception area, found the priest who had come to meet me,
and told him what was happening.

Some fifteen minutes later, so soon after having been “recycled”
to Puerto Rico, and from there to Geneva, via New York, I was
sought out by the same police officer who had so discourteously
escorted me to the waiting area from which I was to leave the coun-
try. “Kindly come with me, sir,” he said, in a much different, more
delicate, tone. “You are to enter the country.”

At the moment I was far readier to leave than to stay, but the
persons who were awaiting me must not be punished, nor must I
fail to accomplish the task for which I had come to the Dominican
Republic. I accompanied the police officer, to the tune of his profuse
apologies, to the passport checkpoint, where the priest stood who
would still have quite a time getting me into the country. I was
listed as “disapproved, ’ it seemed, in the airport register, now surely
replaced by computers. My name—no, there was no mistake—was
there, “Paulo Reglus Neves Freire,” whole and entire, carefully
penned, correct to the letter. This meant that I might not enter the
country after all, and this time for far more serious reasons than
merely not having a visa. Not this time. This time I found myself
on an exceedingly lengthy list of “undesirables’—“dangerous

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 163

subversives,” who posed a “threat,” as, for example, traffickers in
contraband.

The only solution, said the chief of the Airport Police, who had
been summoned for his opinion, was for the priest who had invited
me to speak with the national security chief. The latter alone had
the authority to make the final decision. The police chief himself
made the call, then handed the phone to the priest.

“Yes, General. Yes,” said the priest, “if Professor Freire is willing
to accept these conditions, I shall be responsible for him.”

And with his hand over the mouthpiece, the priest asked me:
“Will you stay the five days here without leaving the building where
were having the seminar? And the press must not know youre in
the country. No one must know. Do you accept?”

“Of course I accept. I came here to converse, to teach, and to
learn, not to make side trips or give interviews. I accept. There is
no problem,” I replied.

“Very well, General. Professor Freire is grateful for the opportu-
nity of entering our country under the conditions you have estab-
lished, and I guarantee that they will be fulfilled to the letter.”

He handed the phone to the chief of police, who listened to the
orders of the national security chief.

I got in. I worked five days. I heard excellent reports on work in
progress in rural and urban areas.

This is what I had come for. It would have betokened political
immaturity on my part if, out of some personal vanity, and feeling
belittled, I had refused the general’s proposal.

In the five days I spent in the country, without giving any inter-
views, without appearing in the streets, without touring the city, I
nevertheless did what I had come there to do.

On the last day, on the trip back to the airport, the father made
some discreet detours through the city so I could get a general idea
of it.

Beyond a doubt, this experience is not to be compared with the
one I had some months later, when I was arrested one night in a
hotel in Libreville, Gabon, in Africa, where I had arrived at the
invitation of the recently installed government of SAo Tomé and
Principe.

What an irony, by the way, to be arrested in a city called Libre-

164 - PAULO FREIRE

ville, for being “exceedingly dangerous,” and having “written a sub-
versive book,” as I was informed, without any beating around the
bush!

“But sir,” I said to the officer whose demeanor was certainly that
of a chief of police, “I'll only be in your country for twenty-four
hours, while I wait for my flight to So Tomé tomorrow afternoon.
Besides, I’m passing through here at the invitation of the govern-
ment of S40 Tomé and Principe. So I only see an abuse of power
here in what you have just communicated to me, and I protest that
abuse: that I will be held at the hotel until tomorrow’s flight.”

“You are not under arrest. You are our guest. Only, you may not
leave your room.”

A few moments later, at the hotel, my room was locked from
the outside.

Not under arrest! Strange terminology.

There was one thing about that first visit to the Caribbean that
impressed me a great deal: the experiment I visited on the lovely
little isle of Dominica.

Peasants living on a large, financially troubled ranch, which had
been a key contributor to the country’s agricultural production, had
persuaded the government to buy the ranch (with the cooperation
of the British company that ran it) and hand it over to them, where-
upon they undertook to purchase it over the course of so-and-so
many years.

The peasants then created a cooperative, with the technological
assistance of an agricultural engineer who had been working with
them. When I visited the experiment, they had already been manag-
ing the property for a little over a year, and were having excellent
results.

There is a personal aspect of my visit that I should like to make
public in this book—an experience of which I spoke of with my
children after my return to Geneva. I was visiting the ranch as the
guest of the president of the peasant cooperative that was managing
the economic, social, and educational life of the ranch. He lived
with his wife—no children—in a very simple house, without elec-
tricity, on a little hill, the kind of hillock we call a morro in Brazil.
In front of the house stood a lush mango tree, some bushes, and a
green lawn.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE «- 165

It was raining when I got out of the car to climb the slippery,
muddy slope—its clay a “cousin” to the massapé of Brazil’s North-
east. With a slip here and a slide there, my right hand tight on the
arm of the president of the cooperative, my feet groping for a foot-
hold, finally we got to the house, which was lighted by a kerosene
lamp.

We spoke a bit, the president and I. His wife, in a corner of the
room, was listening, but not venturing to say anything.

I was tired, and I had my mind more on going to bed than on
anything else.

Before going to my room—their own room, which they had put
at my disposition in a gesture of siblingship—naturally I wanted to
use the bathroom. Then it was that I perceived how far removed I
was from the concrete daily life of peasants, despite my having writ-
ten the book they had read in their study circles and therefore
invited me to come talk with them.

The more I needed to go to the bathroom, the less casual I felt
about asking where it was. This could be complicated. I said to
myself, if I ask where the bathroom is, and there is no bathroom,
how will I be understood?

Suddenly I said to myself: am I not being a bit like the white
liberals who feel guilty when they talk with blacks?—the behavior
to which I have referred a few pages earlier. Only, this time the
division is a class one. I summoned up my courage, then, and asked
my friend: “Where's the bathroom?”

“The bathroom? The bathroom is the world,” said Mr. President,
courteously conducting me beneath the mango tree, where we both
raised the level of the water flowing down through the grass.

Other than the bathroom, my major problem was, the next day,
how to take my morning bath. My morning bath, in the fashion that
I take it, has to do with my class position—just as does the way I
speak, for example with the verb agreeing with the subject, or my
dress, or my gait, or my tastes.

It was a fine thing for me to be living and dealing not only with
the couple with whom I stayed, but with the other peasants there.
It was a fine thing, especially, to be able to observe how they came
at the question of education, culture, technical training—they and
their companions in the co-op.

166 - PAULO FREIRE

To this purpose, I spent two or three days actually out in the
fields, besides joining in a conference set up by the leadership and
attended by well-nigh seventy peasants at which we discussed ques-
tions of curricular organization and problems of teaching and the
learning process.

After a little over a year of being their own bosses, under a demo-
cratic regime—without, therefore, the abuses of, on the one hand,
permissiveness and unlimited freedom, or on the other, unlimited
authority—the work of the ranch was genuinely exemplary. The
contribution of the agronomist, their educator, with his seriousness
and competence, was lauded by all.

The peasants had set up some ten centers throughout the area—
ten “nuclei,” each managed by a team and headed by an elected
officer. They had built ten rustic adobe meeting rooms. They had
gotten sawhorses and laid boards on them for tables. The little rooms
each had an extension, or a corner, that served as a kitchen, where
the members of that particular center met for lunch and social re-
freshment. All of the members of the area around each center would
bring whatever they could—a chicken, a fish, some fruit, or the like.
Teams of two persons, a man and a woman, took turns preparing
the food.

Every day the workers had two hours for lunch, during which time
they discussed problems of daily experience. One of the members of
each center, also in rotation, was in charge of noting down the sub-
jects discussed, or even broached, in the daily meeting. These sub-
jects, the material of the daily meetings, would then be brought up
at the big meeting held every other Saturday at the co-op office
itself, with the agricultural engineer or other experts present. The
ranch in its entirety was regarded by the peasants not only as a
center of economic production, but as their cultural center, as well.
When you got right down to it, the ten “cultural nuclei” were the
best way they had found to divide up the ranch as a totality, in
the process of improving their knowledge and training, just as the
biweekly meeting was the effort to, shall we say, “retotalize” the
divided totality.

It was an experiment in popular education directly connected
with production, and I saw it functioning in an exemplary manner.
This was in the 1970s.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 167

Recently, participating in an international conference in Montego,
Jamaica (May 1992), I met an educator from the Dominican Repub-
lic. We got on the subject of things that had happened years ago,
and I immediately asked her whether she knew how the work on
the community ranch was going. “It’s all over. Politics,” she said.

Toward the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, I was twice
more in the Caribbean. On these occasions my destination was Gre-
nada, the magnificent little island that, seemingly overnight, almost
magically, had mounted a revolution that, all fine and gentle that it -
was, nevertheless failed to escape the fury of the teeth-gnashing,
raging folk who own the world—any more than that of the raging
folk who, while not proprietors of the world, think themselves pro-
prietors of revolutionary truth.

The revolution in Grenada resulted, in its final moment, from an
almost Quixotic geste on the part of its leader, a still-young, ardent
leader, one who had great confidence in his people.

Taking advantage of the absence of the head of the government,
Bishop and a dozen companions attacked a police station. It surren-
dered without resistance. With the weapons captured there, they
were able to arm other militants, then still others. Meanwhile, gov-
ernment forces joined the movement. And the entire government
establishment had collapsed as if it had been run over by a steam-
roller. It was a revolution that had been waiting to happen. Without
the malaise of the popular masses, without their hope and their
readiness for change, the “wild idea” of Bishop and his companions
might not have gotten by the second obstacle.

History does not surrender or bow docilely to the arrogant will
of the voluntarist.(Social transformations occur upon a coinciding of
the popular will, the presence of a leadership blessed with discern-
ment, and the propitious historical moment, Thus, a popular move-
ment seized power with a minimum of social cost. Ruling interests
did not even have time to react. The island was preparing to walk
in a different direction. A different government was attempting to
change the face of the country.

My first visit to the island had been arranged a month before, in
Managua, Nicaragua, where I had gone at the invitation of Fernando
Cardenal, then Literacy Crusade Coordinator and later education
minister. It was in Managua, where I gave the crusade a bit of

168 - PAULO FREIRE

myself, as well, and my understanding of education, that my friend
Arturo Ornelles, who had worked with me in Sao Tomé, in Africa,
and who was then working in the Education Sector of the Organiza-
tion of American States, informed me of the Grenadan ministry of
education's interest that I should visit that country. It was up to me,
Arturo told me.

Arturo took charge of communicating to the government of Gre-
nada that I had accepted the invitation, but that the minister would
have to request my trip to his country from the World Council of
Churches, in whose Education Division I was working. Everything
was in order, and in mid-December we arrived in Grenada, where
every indication was that only the power elite outside the govern-
ment and their foreign masters radically opposed the country's new
political direction. What else could have been expected? They were
defending their class and race interests.

They must have been jubilant, then, when Mr. Bishop’s assassina-
tion at the hands of the sectarian, authoritarian fanaticism of an
incompetent Left—occasioning such a strong reaction on the part
of Fidel Castro—further facilitated the already-easy invasion of the
island. And so the dreams of the popular majorities were demol-
ished. Now they would continue to live their difficult life, perhaps
plunged once more into the fatalism in which there is no place
for utopia.

This was not the historical climate at the time of my two visits to
Grenada. On the contrary, a contagious joy was afoot. People spoke
with the hope of persons who were beginning to share in the re-
creation of their society.

Three meetings on the first visit left an indelible impression on
me. One consisted of an entire day of conversations with the minister
and various national teams, in which we discussed certain basic
aspects of the new education they were gradually attempting to put
in practice..

Together, we reflected on an education that, while respecting chil-
dren's understanding of the world, would challenge them to think
critically. It would be an education in whose practice the teaching
of content would never be dichotomized from the teaching of precise
pee (We spoke of an antidogmatic, antisuperficial thinking—a

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 169

critical thinking, 6 would constantly resist the temptation of
pure improvisation, .

~ Any effort in the direction of implementing the above considera-
tions—that is, any attempt to put into practice an education that,
first, while respecting educands understanding of the world, will
challenge them to think critically, and second, will refuse to separate
the teaching of content from the teaching of thinking precisely—
any such educational enterprise calls for the ongoing formation of
the educators. Their scientific training, above all, calls for a serious,
consistent effort to overcome the old authoritarian, elitist frame-
works, which linger, latent, in the persons in whom they “dwell”
and are ever ready to be reactivated,/, And without the exercise of
this attempt to surmount the old—an attempt that involves our sub-
jectivity, and implies the acknowledgment of its importance, a sub-
jectivity so disdained and belittled by the dogmatism that reduces
it to a mere reflex of objectivity—no attempt at changing the school
by steering it in a democratic direction will likely carry the day)

The two principles I have just stated can actually base an entire
transformation of the school, and of the educational practice within
it. Starting with these two points, I told the educators in our meet-
ings, it would be possible for us to proceed to develop any number
of dimensions, with innovations in curricular organization, with a
new relationship between educators and educands, with new human
relations in the school (administration, teachers, maintenance, secu-
rity), new relations between the school and families, new relations
with the neighborhood the school is in.

It was appropriate that, in February of the following year, 1980, a
National Leadership Training Seminar should be held, which would
subsequently develop into dozens of training meetings all over the
island.

Invited to the February seminar, which had been set up by the
Education Sector of the Organization of American States—the
agency in which Arturo worked, as I have already mentioned—
were Brazilian sociologist, now professor at the Federal University
of Pernambuco, Joao Bosco Pinto, Chilean educational sociologist
Professor Marcela Gajardo, who was unable to attend, myself, and
naturally, Arturo Ornelles.

The second meeting that impressed me so much on my first visit

170 - PAULO FREIRE

to Grenada was the one I had with administrators of the ministry
of education. The minstry set aside a morning for our dialogue, to
which all were invited, including clerks, chauffeurs, secretaries of
the various departments, and typists.

“I am convinced,” the minister told me, in requesting the meet-
ing, “that\well never manage to change, to redirect, pedagogical
policy, and place it in the democratic perspective were striving for,
unless we can count on the participation of all of the sectors that,
in one way or another, make up the ministry of education. Nor shall
we be able to do anything without the cooperation of the educands,
their families, their communities.”

This was actually the first time a new administration that was
gradually taking things in hand had invited me to speak to its educa-
tional personnel on the importance of our school tasks, whether our
own particular job be to sweep the classroom floor or to construct
educational theory. Nor did I practice any demagogy in my ap-
proach, any more than I do today.

Reactions ranged from stunned surprise on some faces, to great
curiosity and an ebullient eagerness to learn more in the expressions
worn by the majority.

One of the conclusions my auditors came to as they sat there with
the minister was that meetings like the one we were holding ought
to be held on a systematic basis, although attendance would be
optional.

The third meeting I was to hold was with Mr. Bishop himself.
He received Arturo Ornelles and me, at the presidential residence,
for nearly three hours. Our conversation was over fruit juice, and
we had at our disposition, for tasting (or ravenous gulping), on a side
table, a luscious tray of native fruits.

At the moment I write, and comb my memory, I wonder about
two or three qualities of that person, so soon to be erased from
the world that loved him, which touched Arturo and me in our
conversation with him.

I think I might begin with his simplicity and lack of artificiality.
It was the simplicity of a person who lived a life of consistency
between what he said and what he did. He did not even need to
make an effort to keep from falling into self-adulation. It was thus
that, with simplicity, at times with the smile of a child, he spoke to

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE : 171

us of the adventurous exploit (but not that of an adventurer) that he
had undertaken, he and his companions, in search of the assumption
of the power that he then sought to re-create.

He had a taste for freedom, and a respect for the freedom of
others. He was determined to help his people help themselves,
mobilize, organize, retrace the outlines of their society. He had a
clear sense of historical opportunity—an opportunity that does not
exist outside of ourselves, an opportunity that makes its appearance
in a certain compartment of time, waiting for us to pursue it, but
an opportunity that is waiting precisely in the relationship between
ourselves and time itself—an opportunity deep in the heart of
events, in the interplay of contradictions. It is an opportunity that
we ourselves create, right in history—in a history that punishes us
both when we fail to take advantage of the opportunity, and when we
simply invent it in our heads, without any foundation in social fabrics.

I remember his dialectical way of thinking (not a way of speaking
about dialectics). The impression I have now, in recalling the meet-
ing, is that Bishop thought dialectically so spontaneously and ha-
bitually that there was no separation in him between discourse and
practice. Hence, for example, the understanding he revealed in con-
versation of the importance of subjectivity in history, which led him
to recognize the role of education before and after the production,
or better, the effort to produce, a new power.

Perhaps this was one of the points, developed in the political
practices of his government, that provoked the “mechanists,” as I
call them, who are so very undialectical and who turned against him.

At one moment in my conversation, Bishop asked me something
that revealed his great relish for democracy, and revealed the re-
markable similarity between him and the great African leader Amil-
car Cabral, about whose struggle we were enthusiastically speaking.
Bishop asked me to devote some of my time to the military during
my visit to the island. He said something like: “It would be very
helpful if you discussed with them the frankly civil spirit with which,
and with which alone, we can remake our society.”

Even without expressing it in so many words, Bishop perceived
that, at bottom, in the democratic reinvention of society, the military
fit in only when they know their function in the service of civil
society. The military fit into civil society, not the other way around.

172 - PAULO FREIRE

And of course this was one of the things I stressed in my conversa-
tion with the military. It provoked certain silences, perhaps in an
expression of disapproval.

Of my meetings, the one with the military was the one that im-
pressed me the least. Before, I had met with some higher-ranking
officers, in Lima, and in Lisbon, after the so-called Carnation Revo-
lution. I had had three hours of conversation with majors and colo-
nels from the various branches. They were a youthful folk, weary of
an unjust, impossible war in Africa.

What was happening, really, was that the Portuguese colonial
armed forces, even in the mid-1970s, enervated by a war in which
they had gradually come to perceive the absurdity of the process,
were having to face off with Africans with whom just the reverse
was happening: they were growing in the conviction of the ethical
and historical correctness of their struggle.

My encounter with the Portuguese military, who had thus been
“conscientized” by the African war—a meeting arranged by a major
who told me he had read Pedagogy of the Oppressed over and over
(over and over in secret, obviously) and had used it on the under-
ground assignments he carried out with other members of the mili-
tary—revealed to me, among other things, this obvious basic point:
the agents of war are not only the highly technical instruments
employed, invaluable though they be; nor are they only men and
women. The agents of war are men, women, and instruments.

For the success of the fight, the ethical awareness and political
awareness of the fighters is of paramount importance. Technology is
at times replaced by the weaker side's power of invention, which
emerges from a strength they possess that is lacking to the mighty:
their ethical and historical conviction that their fight is legitimate.

This is what happened in Vietnam, as well, where a highly ad-
vanced North American technology yielded to a will to be on the
part of the Vietnamese, and to their artful inventiveness, that of the
weaker side.

So this is what happened in Grenada, itself, where a lack of ethical
and historical conviction on the part of the side possessing the weap-
ons gave way to the force of a courage armed with the ethics and
the history with which Bishop and his companions came to power.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 173

In February 1980 we returned to Grenada, Arturo and I, along
with Joéo Bosco Pinto, who was making his first trip there.

First off, we had a meeting with the national planning committee
for the seminar, where we learned how the seminar would function,
and what task would fall to each of us.

The intention of all of us, the national team’s as well as our own,
was to steer the labors of the seminar as much as possible in the
direction of a unification of practice and theory. We therefore ex-
cluded, from the outset, a course consisting of “theoretical” dis-
courses, however fine they might be, on theory and practice, school
and community, the cultural identity of the educands, the relation-
ship between educators and educands, or what it is to teach and
what to learn. Or on the question of programmatic content and how
to organize it. Or on an investigation of the milieu in which the
school is located, or in which various schools in the same area are
located. And so on.

Of course, we should have to create, imagine, hypothetical situ-
ations—authentic codifications—upon which we would ask the par-
ticipants of the seminar, whom we would present with elements
typifying the situation, to spend a given amount of time to write
their analyses: in other words, to decode the codification.

On the basis of the example that I shall now give, we shall be able
to imagine the others, for which, regrettably, none of us any longer
has any documentation. Let me take the example of a sketch in
which we could see a school typical of the island, with a given
number of elements of its ambience included.

The coordinating committee asked the members of the seminar
to:

A. Characterize, describe, what they saw in the picture, in purely
narrative terms.

B. Describe and analyze a day's routine, not only of the school,
but also of the area around the school.

C. Describe, this time more in detail—on the basis of experience,
if they had had such experience, or else on the basis of what

174 - PAULO FREIRE

they had heard—relations between the teachers and students
in such a school.

D. Incase of a need to criticize the kind of relationship prevailing
between teachers and students in the school, to try to identify
the causes of that relationship, and to make suggestions as to
how to improve it.

E. Answer the following question: what do you think is good or
bad about a rural school in whose programmatic content there
is nothing, or almost nothing, about rural lifer

F. Answer this question: in your own practice, what is it, to you,
to teach, and what is it, to you, to learn?

G. Answer this question: do you find that the role of the teacher
is to mold students in accordance with some ideal model of
men and women, or instead, to help them to grow, and to
learn to be themselves? Defend your position.

As I say, there were other such investigatory projects. The partici-
pants had two-and-one half hours to answer, beginning at 8:00 A.M.

Beginning at 10:30, we read the answers. First, each of us indi-
vidually read them. Next, we discussed the various reports among
ourselves. Then, for part of the afternoon, we discussed their im-
plicit or explicit theoretical, political, and methodological aspects
with the entire group.

The dialogue we held with the national educators was a rich one.
Their analysis and their positions stimulated our reaction. And we,
the coordinators of the seminar, engaged in discussions about how
we reacted to the reaction of the national educators.

Over the course of three days, while, from 8:00 to 10:30 a.M., the
participants answered the questions proposed to them, we met with
various cabinet members (the ministers of agriculture, health, and
planning) and conversed with them about the possibility and need
of a common effort in which the efforts of their ministries would be
combined with those of the ministry of education—or better, the
possibility and need to have the ministry of education, in planning

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 175

its policy, do that planning in light of what those of agriculture,
health, and planning had in mind for the country.

I remember that, in our second and last meeting with Mr. Bishop,
we spoke of this need of a comprehensive view of the country—the
importance of an interconnection among the various sectors of the
government, with a view to an adequate balance between the means
and ends of each respective ministry, as well as an adequate commu-
nication among them all. We spoke of the question of ethics in
addressing the public welfare, and of the candor with which the
government, regardless of the breadth or depth of its activity, from
a police department in a remote corner of the island to the prime
ministers cabinet, should say or do things. Everything should be
out in the open. Everything should be explained. We spoke of the
pedagogical nature of the act of governing, of its mission of formation
and of offering an example, which requires utter seriousness on the
part of those who govern. There is no such thing as an authentic,
legitimate, credible government if its discourse is not confirmed by
its practice, if it practices political patronage and the pork barrel, if
it is severe only with the opposition and kind and gentle with its
coreligionists. If you give in once, twice, three times to the shoddy
ethics of the mighty—or even of your “friends,” who are exerting
pressure on you—the floodgates will open. From now on there will
be only scandal upon scandal, and connivance with scandals ends
by anesthetizing its agents and generates a climate typical of the
“democratization of shamelessness. ”

As I sit here recalling these twelve-year-old things I am thinking
about what we are experiencing today in Brazil.| The avalanche of
scandals at the highest levels of power become an example for the
simple citizenry and the people.

Everything becomes possible: deceit, betrayal, lying, stealing,
falsifying, kidnapping, calumny, murder, assault, threats, destruc-
tion, taking “thirty pieces of silver,” buying bicycles as if they were
going to open bicycle rental shops all over the country. We must
put a stop to everything being possible.

The solution, obviously, is not in a hypocritical puritanism, but
in a conscious, explicit relish for purity.

“Td like to talk with you a bit, sir,” said a young man with a

176 - PAULO FREIRE

Portuguese accent, phoning me one Sunday morning in Geneva in
the spring of 1971.

I quickly consulted Elza, and with her consent asked him to come
over for breakfast. I was then to spend the afternoon working on an
upcoming interview for a European periodical. And so, inviting him
to come for 11:00 A.M., I told him in the same breath that at 2:30
I was going to have to start to start a job with a Monday morning
deadline.

In Geneva, everything runs on time. Even the buses run on time.
The 10:04 bus actually comes at 10:04. And if it doesnt, it would
be no surprise if the people of the neighborhood received a courte-
ous letter from the Department of Public Transportation asking for-
giveness and promising that it wont happen again.

And so it was not long after the phone call that the doorbell rang,
and the young man, indeed a Portuguese, had arrived. Uncomfort-
able, and speaking rapidly, the boy swallowed his syllables, and
slurred some vowels in the words of his structure of thought, playing
them differently from the way we in Brazil make them “dance” in
our thought structure. It was just what we Brazilians and Portuguese
find so annoying in conversation with each other. It is not precisely
the tighter rhythm of Portuguese speech that annoys us, and our
more open rhythm that annoys them. It is the syntax. Nor is it the
semantics inextricably imbedded in the syntax. It is the syntax itself,
the thought structure. This is what annoys us both.

In 1969, two years before that morning in Geneva when I con-
versed with the uneasy young man, I had received, in the United
States, a series of little notes, several of them written on the same
sheet of paper, from Portuguese who had only recently learned to
read and write. They had been sent by peasants of a rural area near
Coimbra. They were writing to me to express their gratitude for
what I had done for them, to tell me of their friendship, and to
invite me, when political conditions should permit, to come and
visit them, so that I might receive their embraces and hear of their
fondness for me.

A young American was the bearer of the messages, and she
brought me one more thing along with them—a banner, or pennant.
The motto on the pennant, by the way, is worth pondering: “There
are people who can make flowers grow where it had seemed impos-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 177

sible.” Yes, they might have thought they had been born to a sure
fate, under the sign of an inability to read words, and had been
convinced of this. But they had learned to read words. And so the
reason must have been outside themselves! In their teachers and in
me. Of course, had they failed, the reason would have had to be
inside themselves.

I answered all of those who had written to me by penning little
cards, in a simple, though never simplistic, language, and addressing
them in care of Maria de Lourdes Pintacilgo, who within a few years
would become prime minister of Portugal, and who at the time,
together with Tereza Santa Clara, was heading the efforts of a group
of excellent folk working in the area of popular education. The liter-
acy campaign in that rural area near Coimbra was only a small
part of what was being accomplished by that dedicated, competent,
loving, and discerning Grail team.

At one point in our conversation, that Sunday morning on which
I report here, the young Portuguese gentleman referred directly to
the work at Coimbra. “Does Paulo Freire know how a group of
Catholic women have perverted his ideas in the countryside
around Coimbra?”

“What I know of the work done in Coimbra doesnt seem to me
to be a distortion of my proposals. By all indications, it was simply
what could concretely be done,” I said, and I went on: “Under what
regime, under what police observation do you think those young
women were working in Coimbra?”

But without answering my questions, the young man insisted that
“they had not associated the literacy campaign with the political
struggle against Salazar. They were just nice little Catholic girls.
They had no understanding of the class struggle as the thrust of
history,” he concluded, triumphantly.

Three years had passed since the conscientizagdo of the Portu-
guese colonial armed forces. The Carnation Revolution had erupted.
A new government was in place, and had initiated the process of
democratizing Portugal and decolonizing the Africa once misnamed
“Portuguese.

Hope reigned. Spirits forbidden to so much as speak shouted and
sang. Minds prohibited from thinking discoursed, and burst the
bonds that had held them.

8 PauLo FREIRE

I visited Portugal at the invitation of the new government, in
which the university had joined, and I spoke to teachers and stu-
dents. I visited Coimbra, and its university. And of course, led by
the same loving, dedicated young women who had believed in God
and in the need to change the world in behalf of the outcast and
had done such wonderful service in the environs of the city, I visited
the peasants who, in 1969, had written me those cards that spoke
of their brotherly and sisterly love. I embraced them all, lovingly.
Our personhoods were, as it were, inscribed on one another's hearts,
and our affectionate discourse expressed a mutual gratitude. Theirs
to me. Mine to them all.

It was that morning in Coimbra, out in the country, that I learned
of the little rural community that, along with a small number of
others, had given such complete support to the revolutionary gov-
ernment at one of the moments when the Right was flailing about
in all its frenzy. One of the more daring of the elderly peasants
taking the literacy course with the young women of the Grail got
up early one particular morning, and, before anyone else was awake,
went around collecting all the Fascist propaganda that had been
distributed during the night in her little village. The whole village
refused to support the rightist demonstration to which they had
been invited by these pamphlets!

No discourse on the class struggle had been necessary during the
literacy course, however real that struggle might be, in order for
her and her companions to perceive, once the right moment had
come, the relationship between the reading of the word, the reading
of the world, and above all, the transformation of the world!

The only sensible way for the Catholic girls to have done their
work had been within the limits of good tactics. Any other approach
would have been “reactionary.”

News of the Carnation Revolution took me by surprise on a thirty-
five-day visit to Australia, New Zealand, and some of the principal
islands of the region. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, once more, was
at the center of the frameworks of our meetings. Its publication by
Penguin Books, as I have pointed out, enabled it to reach all of that
world, along with India, and the misnamed “British” Africa.

Never have I accepted the denomination of British, French, or
Portuguese Africa, not to mention the other “Africas.” I have dis-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 179

puted with friends in the ministries of the Portuguese ex-colonies
(“Portuguese ex-colonies,” yes) a number of times, arguing against
the designation of a “Portuguese-speaking Africa.” I do not believe
in the existence of such a thing, any more than in that of a “French-
speaking” or “English-speaking” Africa. What we have is an Africa
over which there hovered, in domination, colonial-style, the Portu-
guese language, the French language, the English language. That
is another matter.

The big risk, or one of the big risks, of these Africas is that, partly
out of nostalgia for the old colonial days—under the impulse of
the ambivalent feeling the colonized have for the colonizers, one of
repulsion and attraction at once, to which Memmi (Albert Memmi)
refers—partly from necessity, partly under pressure, linguistic “ex-
expressions consisting of the old linguistic bonds would now deepen
into an incarnation of a new kind of “language” or expression: the
neocolonial. Not that I defend, for the various Africas, the absurdity,
the impossibility, of an absolute breach with the past, which basically
remains untransformed, and a renunciation of the positive factors in
the cultural influences of old Europe. What I defend and recom-
mend is a radical breach with colonialism, and an equally radical
rejection of neocolonialism. I call for the defeat of the colonial bu-
reaucracy, as I actually suggested to the governments of Angola,
Bissau, and S4o Tomé and Principe; the defeat of the colonial school,
the formulation of a cultural policy that would take seriously the
question of the national languages, which the colonizers called, pejo-
ratively, “dialects.”

In fact, (colonized persons and colonial nations never seal their
liberation, conquer or reconquer their cultural identity, without as-
suming their language and discourse and being assumed by it/

That a Portuguese, a French, a British ex-colony not turn its back
on these languages and these cultures, that they make use of them,
that they study them, that they take advantage of their positive
elements, is not only right and good, but altogether needful. The
basic thing, however, is that the country that receives “foreign aid,”
in whatever form that aid be offered, technological or artistic, do so
as an active, autonomous agent, and not as the passive object of the
transfer effectuated by the other country. I was once told, perhaps
by way of caricature, that a certain African country had received

180 - PAULO FREIRE

foreign aid (to be repaid, however) from the former Soviet Union,
in the form of a snowplow, for clearing the streets after snowstorms!
In this case, it was the Soviet Union that fluttered over this country
of Africa!

But to get back to the trip to Australia, New Zealand, Papua New
Guinea, and Fiji. I shall omit any commentaries on the beauty,
in some cases the peerless beauty, of this region, and attempt to
concentrate on one or other point of the theory of which I speak in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a theory anchored in my own practice
rather than in other persons practices that I would have been able
to explain theoretically. This was true, by and large, of everything
I did on the journey, in discussion, research, negative criticism,
concordant analysis, and requests for explanation.

In Australia, especially, I had the opportunity of associating with
intellectuals, Marx’s loyal allies, who precisely as his authentic fol-
lowers had grasped the dialectical relationship between the world
and consciousness, and had assimilated the theses defended in Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed rather than looking upon it as a volume of
idealism. But I also dialogued with persons imprisoned in a dogma-
tism likewise of Marxist origin, who, while not precisely belittling
consciousness, reduced it to a mere shadow of materiality. For those
who thought in this way, mechanistically, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
was a book of bourgeois idealism. Actually, however, one of the rea-
sons why this book continues to be as much sought after as it was
twenty-two years ago may be precisely because of content that led
certain critics of that time to regard it as idealistic and bourgeois. I
refer to the importance the book ascribes to consciousness, without,
however, seeing consciousness as the arbitrary maker of the world.
I refer to its recognition of the manifest importance of the individual,
without ascribing to individuals as such a strength they do not have.
I mean\the weight, which the book likewise recognizes, in our life,
individual and social, of feelings, passion, desires, fear, insight, the
courage to love, to be angry.) I mean the book's vehement defense
of humanistic positions, but without ever sliding into sloppy senti-
mentalism. I mean its understanding of history, in whose intermin-
gled context and motion it seeks to understand that of which it
speaks. I mean its rejection of sectarian dogmatic opinions. I mean
its relish for the ongoing struggle, which generates hope, and with-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 18]

out which the struggle withers and dies. I mean Pedagogy’s perva-
sive opposition, so “early on,” to the neoliberals, who fear the
dream, not the impossible—since the impossible should not even
be dreamt of, while the dream makes things possible—in the name
of facile adaptations to the catastrophes of the capitalist world.

Many in the 1970s, sometimes in a letter addressed to me, said:
“I desiderate the Marxist presence in your analyses, or your igno-
rance of the fact that ‘the class struggle is the driving force of history.
But I think” (and these persons were the most sensible of the lot!)
“that we can get something out of what you are doing and saying by
‘rewriting you in a Marxist vein.” And many of the men and women
who thus expressed themselves are to be found today, sadly, in the
ranks of the “pragmatic realists,” although at least they acknowledge
the social classes when they walk through the hills, gullies, slums,
callampas, and streets of Latin America. |

And so I traveled through much of Australia. I held discussions
with factory workers, with “aborigines,” as they are called (I was
received by one of their groups at a special meeting). I held debates
with university professors and students, and with religious groups,
Protestant and Catholic. In the religious groups, whether Catholic
or Protestant, the launching pad was the Theology of Liberation,
both the importance of that theology, and the defeat it proposed of
accommodation and immobilism through acceptance of the deep
meaning of the presence of man and woman in history, in the
world—a world ever to be re-created on pain of having, not a world,
but a mere platform to set things on.

In New Zealand, I held more discussions about Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, with groups like those in Australia and emphasizing one
aspect or other of the book. I was impressed by my discussions
with indigenous leaders—with their insight, their awarness of their
position of subjection and their rejection of that position, their thirst
for the struggle, their nonconformity. Today, the Maori population
of one-hundred-thousand, who are bilingual, have the option of |
studying their own language in the schools.*

My trip through Papua New Guinea was a hasty one. The island

*The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987).

182 - PAULO FREIRE

was preparing to gain its autonomy, take itself in hand, within a few
months, no longer to be a “protectorate” of Australia, which it had
been since the end of World War II.

One of the meetings I set up was with a group of young politicos
who bade fair to play a salient role among the leaders of the process
of assumption of the reins of national government. Our meeting
was a lengthy one, concentrating on problems of development and
education, education and democracy. Primary, secondary, and uni-
versity education. Cultural identity. Language, ideology, social
classes.

That evening I shared in a discussion at the university, whose
topics, as might have been expected, included doubts and criticisms
about certain elements in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Some of the criticisms repeated others I had heard previously,
in Australia.

Along with certain merits of the book, the “idealistic” stamp of
my humanism was emphasized, for example—the “vagueness,” to
which I have referred in the present book, in my concept of “op-
pressed, or in my concept of “people.”

I rejected that sort of criticism, of course, just as I do today. But
our debates never lost the tone of a dialogue, never became polemi-
cal. The persons who dissented from my positions obviously meant
me no harm. Their criticisms did not feed on some uncontainable
rage against me. Thus, even in the case of diametrically opposed
positions, in Australia or in New Zealand, the respectful relationship
that prevailed between those who disagreed with me and myself was
never lost. The same thing had occurred between North American
scholar Chester Bowers and me at the University of Oregon, at a
debate in the presence of sixty members of a seminar, in July 1987.

CHAPTER

;

e disagreed almost across the board, for an hour and a
half, but without having to offend or abuse each other.
We simply argued for our respective, mutually contradic-
tory positions. We did not have to distort anything in each other's |
thinking. a

The last stop on my long trip was Fiji. Two key events made my
journey to such distant corners of the world well worth the while.
One was a meeting at the University of the South Pacific, at which
the students dealt with me in such a tone of intimacy that it was as
if I were their teacher there, and lived there with them in their
campus dorms. So familiar were they with my books, thanks to their
translation into English.

Still today, I enjoy, genuinely enjoy, the recollection of the evening
of that meeting. The huge auditorium, recently dedicated, was
crammed to the rafters, with people spilling out into the university
gardens, somewhat similarly to what happened this past April (1992)
at the State University of Santa Cruz at Itabuna, in Bahia.

On both occasions, in the 1970s in Fiji and more recently in
Itabuna, loudspeakers had to be installed facing the gardens of both
universities, and the meeting delayed until they were in place.

Obviously we could not have the dialogue that we should have
liked to have. On both occasions I simply spoke to the students. In
Fiji in the 1970s I spoke about certain matters discussed in Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, one of the textbooks they used in their courses.
In the 1990s, in Itabuna, my material was from the present

184 - PAULO FREIRE

book, in which I am revisiting and reliving Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.

Let the reader not puzzle long over why I set these two meetings
in contiguity here, despite their distance in time and space. They
had an element of similarity. The participants of both, students of
some twenty years ago from the islands of the South Pacific, and
students of today in Itabuna, Bahia, were impelled by like motives:
they were on fire with a love of freedom, and had found a point of
reference in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The second event was the homage offered me by the native com-
munity of a village deep in a beautiful, thick wood.

It was a festival at which politics, religion, and siblingship
mingled.

The leaders and other members of the community were abreast
of what I was doing and what I was writing about. Some of them
had even read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And so they welcomed
me as an intellectual committed to the same cause that mobilized
them and stirred them to the struggle. They insisted on stressing
this aspect, just as had the natives of Australia, called aborigines, in
receiving me with such intimacy, deep in the heart of their own
culture.

( It was as if, in the spirit and the rituals of their traditions, they
had been bestowing an honorary doctorate on me.|

For that matter, this becomes one of the reasons why, not out of
arrogance, but out of a legitimate sense of satisfaction, I have ac-
cepted the homage of the intellectuals of the academies, and the
intellectuals of field and factory.

I have no reason, in the name of some false modesty, to hide, on
one hand, the fact that I am offered these homages, or on the other,
the wholesome fact that I welcome them—that they gladden me,
and comfort and encourage me.

The deeply meaningful ritual with which the solemnity or festival
proceeded was simple and lighthearted. Yet it touched me deeply.
Ultimately, the symbolic act of the ceremony, as I understood it
(neither was it explained to me, nor do I think it ought to have
been), suggested to me that, though a stranger, and unendowed with
certain qualities or certain basic prerequisites, I was nevertheless
being invited to “enter” into the spirit of the culture, of its values,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 185

of its siblingship. To this purpose, however, I had to “suffer” or
undergo experiences calculated to result in my capacity to “commu-
nicate” with the loveliness and “ethnicity” of that culture.

It was significant, for example, that, at the beginning of the cere-
mony, basically one of purification, I might not speak. I was forbid-
den the right to the word—which is fundamental, indispensable,
for communion. But not just any word can seal communion. Hence
my silence until certain things should occur during the ceremony
that would reestablish my word. Hence also the designation, by the
priest, of an ‘orator’ to speak in my name. Unless I could speak, in
the intimacy or heart of the culture—even before my own word
should be reestablished—it would be impossible for me to “suffer”
the experience of the reestablishment of my word in absolute si-
lence. The word that was lent to me by my representative had the
function of mediating the reconquest of my own.

Only in the course of the ceremonial process, after the official
speech of a delegate of the group, whose discourse was not translated
for me, possibly a discourse of requirements being made of me, to
which my “representative” responded, and only after taking, from
the same “chalice” as he, the purifying drink, without manifesting
any reluctance, was I finally ascribed the right to speak in the inti-
macy of his world.

My discourse was then the discourse of a quasi-sibling: a formal
discourse that conformed to the rules, to the ethico-religious exigen-
cies of the culture.

I now spoke a few words, in English, with a French Catholic
priest who had been in Fiji for twenty years as my simultaneous
translator, even though nearly everyone present understood En-
glish. I told of my joy and sense of honor at having become able to
speak after such a long period of silence. My speech, I added, | had
been augmented by a meaning that it had not had before./ Now
my speech had been legitimated in a different culture, in which
communion was not only among men and women and gods and
ancestors, but also among all the other expressions of life. Now the
universe of communion included the trees, the animals, the beasts,
the birds, the very earth, the rivers, the seas: life in plenitude

There were days—my days in all that part of the Pacific, and not
only in Australia or New Zealand or Papua New Ginea or Fiji—

186 - PAULO FREIRE

when I was torn inwardly in so many directions. I felt pulled toward
the astonishing beauty of nature, of human creation; toward the
feeling for life, and love for the earth; toward the populations called
aborigines; and I was overwhelmed anew by a wickedness I already
knew—the wickedness of racial and class discrimination. Race and
class discrimination is an agressive, ostentatious discrimination, at
times. At times, it is covert, instead. But wicked it always is.

I have saved, purposely, a bit of commentary on my last visit to
Chile and my first visit to Argentina, for the end. It was in June
1973, while the Popular Unity regime was in power, that I most
recently visited Chile, a few months before the violence of the coup
burst over the heads of all. It was waiting in the wings, though, that
was plain to see. My first visit to Argentina, in November 1973,
would be separated from the next by a long interval, on account of
the coup that resulted in the banishment of the books of Marx,
Darcy Ribiero, and myself.

When I read the decree published in the press I could scarcely
resist sending a telegram to the general who had appointed himself
president to thank him for the excellent company in which he had
placed me.

My trip to Chile in June 1973, regardless of the angle from which
I observe it, and far as I am from it today, was one of the most
unforgettable I have ever made.

I shall concentrate on two moments that I experienced then, in
the extraordinary climate of the struggle of the political ideologies,
in the class confrontation that reached such levels of finesse on the
part of the dominant classes and was such a powerful learning pro-
cess for the popular classes. It was apropos of this era that I heard
from a worker that he had learned more in one week than in all his
life up until then. What the young worker was ultimately referring
to was the process of his apprenticeship in the class struggle. He
had been serving on a committee of workers who were trying to
understand the reasons why, suddenly, countless articles had begun
to be absent from the Chilean market—rubber nipples that go on
baby bottles, chickens, basic medicines, and so on.

Fathers and mothers spent sleepless nights, their children crying,
on account of the shortage of rubber nipples. If you could find one
rubber nipple in the pharmacies of Santiago it was a miracle.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 187

“Good day, sir. Do you have any rubber nipples?”

“No, I'm very sorry. Its the fault of those who voted for Allende” —
the little memorized ideological speech that was supposed to be
recited those days, as I was told, in Santiago.

That is class struggle.

“Do you have a pollo—a chicken?”

“No. It’s the fault of those who voted for Allende.”

The dominant class had buried poultry by the thousands, reason-
ing that a temporary poultry-shortage was a small price to pay for a
win tomorrow, without risk.

That is class struggle.

Some twenty years ago, the dominant class concealed merchan-
dise, diverted products, and lied and said that it was the fault of
those who had voted for Allende. Today, it pronounces a neoliberal
discourse, in which, not only in Chile, but all over the world, it talks
of the nonexistence of classes, and says that to protest the evil of
capitalism is to return to the perilous, negative, destructive dream
that has already done so much harm.

I hope that we progressives, who suffer, who lose companions,
siblings, friends, in the perversity of all the coups we have had come
crashing down on us, will be careful not to lend an ear to these
falsehoods, which masquerade as postmodernity but are as hoary as
the bullying and despotism of the mighty. .

The first moment to which I should like to make reference is that
of a meeting in which I participated with a large group of Marxist
educators, who lodged criticisms identical with the “Marxist” criti-
cisms to which I have already referred in this book. For example,
they would cite my supposed failure to assign sufficient importance
to the class struggle, or my “idealism,” or the dialogue that, ac-
cording to some of them, seemed to smack of “democratism” or
humanism—as well as, once more, of the “idealism,” with which |
Pedagogy of the Oppressed was alleged to be riddled. |

It was a lively debate, and we went on for over two hours. It was
recorded on tape to be printed as an issue of a Santiago educa-
tional periodical.

Unfortunately, I have lost track of my copy of the periodical, ad
so can now neither transcribe any of the things said, nor report
more precisely on the topics addressed. But I can certainly declare

188 - PAULO FREIRE

the excellence of that encounter in terms of the seriousness with
which we conducted our discussions.

I can see their faces now, even as I write, nineteen years to the
month since that encounter, those debating companions of mine
that evening in Santiago. I had been so full of hope that they had
not let themselves so much as be tempted by the language of “prag-
matic” accommodation to the world.

Before saying good-bye, and leaving the spacious hall, I asked my
interlocutors to turn around and cast a critical glance at a poster
they had been using for the literacy campaign. There were several
posters hanging on the walls.

A middle-aged workman, sitting at a table, was having showered
over his passive head, by a strong, determined hand—as if it were
crumbling something between its fingers—pieces of words. The vig-
orous hand of the educator was sowing letters and syllables in the
purely recipient head of the worker.

“This poster,” I then told them, “was drawn by a progressive! That
makes it completely inconsistent. Without so much as batting an
eyelash, it goes ahead and expresses a barefaced authoritarian ideol-
ogy. But besides that, it betrays a profound scientific ignorance of
the nature of language.

“This is really the kind of poster that ought to be ed by reaction-
aries, who, to their reactionism, join a crying ignorance of language,
as I have just said.”

Then there was another poster. It said: Quem sabe, ensina a quem
nao sabe (The one who knows teaches the one who knows not).

[- “But for the one who knows to be able to teach the one who
knows not,” I said then, and I repeat now, “first, the one who knows
must know that he or she does not know all things; second, the one
who knows not must know that he or she is not ignorant of every-
thing. Without this dialectical understanding of knowledge and igno-
rance, it is impossible, in a progressive, democratic outlook, for the
one who knows to teach the one who knows not.”

The second specially exciting moment of that visit (a trip I have
referred to earlier in this book) was the entire evening I spent, in the
company of sociologist Jorge Fiori, in Poblaci6n Nueba Habana—a
“land invasion” that had begun to acquire the aspect of a cidade
livre, a free city. I saw and felt, close up, the ability of the popular

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 189

classes to organize and govern—the wisdom with which the lider-
anca not only detected problems, but also discussed them with the
whole population of the quasi cidade. No decisions were ever taken,
in the collective life of the “cidade,” without first being submitted
to discussion by all.

They believed in the democracy they were building together, in
the “popular” law they had begun to codify, in the equally popular,
progressive, democratic education they were in the course of shap-
ing. They believed in the individual and social solidarity in which
they felt and knew they were growing. And, on account of all of this,
they also knew themselves to be, on the one hand, the agents of
fright and fear in the dominant class, and on the other, the objects
of that class’s unbridled fury.

Nueba Habana was destroyed. Its leader was murdered in Sep-
tember 1973.

Its spirit of freedom, its sibling dream, its socialist ideal, live—
perhaps, just possibly, biding their time against a possible return, by
way of the defeat or rejection of the neoliberal “pragmatic” discourse.

In August 1973 I received a telephone call from Buenos Aires. It
was from the chief of staff of Dr. Taiana, the Argentine minister of
education. He told me that the minister himself wished to speak
with me.

“Professor Freire,” said Dr. Taiana, “we should be most pleased
if you would accept our invitation to come to Buenos Aires as soon
as you can. It would be ideal, for example, around the turn of the
month.”

I had already committed myself, for this same period, to certain
meetings sponsored by the World Council of Churches that I could
not afford to miss.

And so the visit was scheduled for November 1973—after the
ministry had accepted certain conditions I laid down! Not working
in the evening was one; some evenings, when possible, out listening
to tango music was another.

The ministry complied. I worked hard in the daytime, but I went
out to hear tango music two evenings, there in Buenos Aires!

On my way to Argentina, I stayed overnight with my dear friend
Darcy Ribeiro, in Lima. We talked all night, such was our fondness
for each other and our restless curiosity to know—the curiosity of

190 - PAULO FREIRE

those alone who, knowing that they know, know that they know little,
and that they need and can know more. Not the curiosity of persons
have who know themselves to be glutted with knowing.

Sitting in his pontifical-style armchair, with his legs tucked under
him, Darcy talked about his work in Peru, his plans for books, his
reflections in the areas of culture and education. He spoke, we
spoke, also of our homesickness for Brazil. We saw once more what
we had seen, and how we had seen what we had seen, in the days
before the 1964 coup, when Darcy was President Goulart’s™ chief
of staff and I was running the National Program for Adult Literacy.*!

We spoke of Chile. Of his meetings with Allende, of the assassi-
nated president's genuinely democratic mind and spirit. Of the coup
in Chile that would have come even if the Left had not made the
mistakes it had made. The fewer the mistakes, the sooner the coup
would have come. In the last analysis, the reason for the coup was
much more in the correct things the Left had done than in any
mistakes it had made.

Our magnificent friend, Darcy's and mine, the great Peruvian—
or rather, Latin American—philosopher Augusto Salazar Bonde,
leader of Peru's great educational reform, whom Darcy and I, along
with Ivan Illich, had helped out, picked me up at.the airport. A
week later, on my way back to Europe, I visited him in the hospital
where he was to die within a few days. The cancer that had been
killing him was still unrecognized, and was finally diagnosed only
the evening before he died.

I remember, now, my conversations with philosopher Salazar in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, sitting talking with Illich, or in Geneva in our
home, or in Lima with his team. Always the serious, engaged, lucid
thinker, Augusto was never an obscurer. He was always an unveiler.

When I met him, toward the end of 1969 in Cuernavaca, he had
read a series of my texts, among them some that had been incorpo-
rated into Pedagogy of the Oppressed and that had been published
by the Center for Intercultural Formation, at Cuernavaca, which
Illich directed.

From Augusto I heard some of the analyses in function of which
it seemed to him that Pedagogy of the Oppressed, then in process
of being translated into English, would not be a book of merely
transitory interest. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed is not a ‘con-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE : ]19l

junctural’ book,” he told me one day, meaning not an “occasional”
one, not a composition occasioned by the fortuitous conjunction of
concrete phenomena that might not be repeated, or might recur
only rarely.

On my way from the Lima airport, in the car with Augusto, I had
a painful presentiment that my friend was nearing the end. I did
not say anything to him, although something told me that he knew
he was dying. My suspicions grew when he began to tell me about
a book he was working on. He told me he was so concerned about
whether he would have time to get it written that one day he de-
cided to dictate portions of it onto a tape as he drove his car from
one place to another. “I give the tapes to the secretary every day,”
he said.

I do not know whether my friend managed to record his book—
finish it.

I was glad to have seen him on my way to Argentina, and then,
for the last time, on the way back. I only regret that I was unable
to talk with him about what I had seen—all I had seen and heard
in Argentina: a cultural revolution almost without a power base. A
cultural revolution being mounted by a government that was power-
less in so many respects. A project in the field of systematic educa-
tion, and one of huge wealth and creativity. An experiment that
moved Darcy Ribeiro to say, excitedly, “Please, pay attention to what
youre doing!”

My week in Buenos Aires was divided thus: two four-hour meet-
ings with the rectors of all of the country’s public universities; an
all-day meeting with the ministry's various technical teams; a meet-
ing with a popular group in a slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires;
and finally, an evening with political activists, at which we discussed
what was happening in the country.

I was actually surprised at the innovative élan with which the
universities were hurling themselves into the effort of their own re-
creation. In all aspects of the experiment, there was something
worth watching in each of them. Instruction and research both
strove to avoid any dichotomy between them, as it ultimately harms
them both. Another effort was in the area of “extension.” In fact,
although not all of the universities included extension projects in
their renewal, most of them did. And instead of limiting this effort

192 - PAULO FREIRE

to simply doing social work in popular areas, the universities were
beginning to encounter social movements, popular groups. And this
encounter sometimes occurred at the university itself, not only in
the popular areas. I remember discussing, at-some length, not only
the political problem, but the epistemological question it involved.

More than ever before, political decision making, in a progressive
mold, ought to be extended into populism, so that a university would
place itself in the service of popular interests, as well This would
imply, as well, in practice, a critical comprehension of how university
arts and sciences ought to be related with the consciousness of the
popular classes: that is, a critical comprehension of the interrelations
of popular knowledge, common sense, and scientific cognition.

I had no doubt then, any more than I do today, that, when we
think in critical terms of the university and the popular classes, in
no way are we admitting that the university should close the door
on an altogether-rigorous concern for research and instruction.

It does not pertain to the nature of a university's relationship with
or commitment to the popular classes to tolerate a want of rigor, or
any incompetence. On the contrary, the university that fails to strive
for greater rigor, more seriousness, in its research activities as in
the area of instruction—which are never dichotomizable, true—
cannot seriously approach the popular classes or make a commit-
ment to them.

At bottom, the university ought to revolve around two basic con-
cerns, from which others derive and which have to do with the
circle of knowledge.\The circle of knowledge has but two moments,
in permanent relationship with each other{the moment of the cogni-
tion of existing, already-produced, knowledge, and the moment of
our own production of new howled hile insisting on the impos-
sibility of mechanically separating eithér moment from the other—
both are moments of the same circle. I think it is important to bring
out the fact that the moment of our cognition of existing knowledge
is by and large the moment of instruction, the moment of the teach-
ing and learning of content; while the other, the moment of the
production of new knowledge, is, in the main, that of research. But
actually, all instruction involves research, and all research involves
instruction. {There is no genuine instruction in whose process no
research is performed by way of question, investigation, curiosity,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 193

creativity; just as there is no research in the course of which re-
searchers do not learn—after all, by coming to know, they learn, and
after having learned something, they communicate it, they teach))

The role of any university, progressive or conservative, is to im-
merse itself, utterly seriously, in the moments of this circle. The role
of a university is to teach, to train, to research. What distinguishes a
conservative university from another, a progressive one, must never
be the fact that the one teaches and does research and the other
does nothing.

The universities with whose rectors I worked with for eight hours
in Buenos Aires in 1973 held this same conviction. None of them
was making any attempt to reduce the self-democratization of the
university to a simplistic approach to knowledge. This is not what
they were concerned about. What they were concerned about was to
diminish the distance between the university and what was done
there, and the popular classes, without the loss of seriousness and
rigor.

Another matter, to which the rectors and their advisers likewise
gave attention, in the area of instruction, was Heide for an inter-
disciplinary understanding of teaching, instead of merely a disciplin-
ary one.)

Various academic departments sought to work in this way in an
attempt tofovercome the compartmentalization of views to which
we subject reality, and in which, not infrequently, we become lost.

However, not everything was coming up roses. Inevitably, there
were reactions on the part of sectarians—ideologues of Left and Right
alike, so deeply rooted in their truth that they never admitted anything
that might shake it—a Left and a Right equally endowed with a capac-
ity for hatred of anything different, intolerant persons, private pro-
prietors of a truth not lightly to be doubted, let alone denied.

It was a fine thing, however fragile and threatened, that process
I experienced so intensely over the course of a week, and I let no
single meeting go by without expressing my concerns and suggest-
ing tactics—tactics that would be consistent with the progressive
strategic dream that animated the other participants, of course. It
would be necessary (as I always told them, while they sat with fright-
ened eyes, listening to my warnings, which seemed to them so
unfounded) to be astute—wise as serpents. Some of them did not

\>

194 - PAULO FREIRE

understand, and even reacted with annoyance when I told them it
seemed to me that there was a big difference between what they
were doing in the country, on the level of education, of culture, of
the popular movement, of discourse, and the real power bases of
their government. Not that they ought to limit themselves to doing
just something. No, they ought to do a great deal. Only, they had
better keep their eyes peeled when it came to the discrepancy
just cited.

It did not seem to me that the fine-tuned sensitivity and knowIl-
edge of a good political analyst was needed to sniff the coup in the
air, while I was “knocked for a loop” by the June 1973 “street corner
coup’ in Chile.

For example, in one of the meetings I had with the ministry
technologists, someone from the police got in, and even asked me
some rather provocative questions. After two sessions, one of the
educators, a bit surprised, and disgusted, communicated the fact to
me. I spoke to the coordinator, who replied that this would have no
consequences. The educators with whom I was conversing were not
discussing anything not public. Still, the presence of the police off-
cial meant more than how he might be able to use what he heard
us say: his presence betrayed the imbalance between power and the
government. Finally: true, this was an official meeting, sponsored
by the government and convoked by the minister of education; yet,
the repressive organs held the real power, and had infiltrated the
meeting to do some “policing.” It was as if—in fact it was actually
the case—the reactionary forces running the country had, out of
purely tactical considerations, permitted Peron’s return, but mean-
while kept a very close eye on his government.

I think I should not be off the mark if, now, so long afterward, I
were to say that, in none of the workshops in which I participated,
not even in the one I held with the political activists, did anyone
agree with my observations. Sometimes, like the Chileans in the
early months of the Christian Democratic government, they said I
was still showing the scars of the trauma I had sustained on the
occasion of the 1964 Brazilian military coup.

The further they went with their programs, either in the universi-
ties or in the popular regions, in various areas of endeavor, practi-
cally all of these programs being in response to, and stimulating,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 195

popular curiosity, the more enraged the watchful forces of the coup
became as they prepared the final debacle.

I expressed, in my conversations, my serious concern for my hear-
ers in terms of sheer survival—at least in the case of some of them,
those whose political participation might be, or might have been,
major, or more in view, those whose practice had closer visible ties
with the popular classes, or those whose picture the repressive serv-
ice might have elected to paint in stronger colors.

Regrettably, my warnings were only too well-founded. The coup
came after Peron’s death. It was violent and wicked. Some of my
friends who had not seen any basis for my analyses had to leave the
country in hasty secrecy, while others, unfortunately, disappeared
forever.

To them, and to all of the men and women in Latin America, in
the Caribbean, in Africa, who have fallen in the just fight, I offer
my respectful and loving homage, in this Pedagogy of Hope.

And now I shall bring my book to a conclusion, with a succinct
report of the visit my spouse Nita and I paid to El Salvador in July
of 1992.

In El Salvador, the peasant men and women who had been strug-
gling, all through these years—with weapons in their hands and, at
the same time, with curious eyes for sentences and words, as they
read and reread the world, as they fought to make that world less
ugly and less unjust by learning to read and write words—had in-
vited me to celebrate with them, in hope, an interval of peace in
the war. They wished to tell me of what they were doing, and show
me what they were doing. It was their way of rendering me homage.

They were joined by their teachers, some of the liderangas in the
battle, and the National University of E] Salvador, which bestowed
on me its doctorate honoris causa.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed was once more the nucleus around
which our discussions revolved. Its basic theses were even more
current and vital now than they had been at the time of its first
editions in the 1970s. Not only had these peasant strugglers become
familiar with adult literacy campaigns since then, as these campaigns
were being conducted in the guerrilla encampments, but they saw
Pedagogy itself, across the board, as a book of great import precisely

196 - PAULO FREIRE

for the historical moment in which they were living. I might put it
this way: Pedagogy of the Oppressed was here the heart and soul of
the literacy campaign being waged in favor of a reading of the world
and a reading of the word—a reading that was at once a reading of
context and a reading of text, a practice and a theory in dialectical
oneness.

It is even possible that what Nita and I saw in E] Salvador—first,
guerrilla wars fusing militants together in their very differences, in
function of their strategic objectives, militants who had matured in
the crucible of suffering (radicals and not sectarians, then, educators
with open, critically optimistic eyes); second, the Right, while unsat-
isfied, nevertheless more or less well behaved; third, the needed
presence and example of the United Nations, ensuring the peace
accord—it is even possible that all of this might collapse, be undone,
and that would be profoundly regrettable, from the viewpoint of
how much all this is coming to mean for current history.

What cannot be denied is that there is something relatively un-
precedented in this experiment: Right and Left making mutual con-
cessions in order to assure peace and thereby diminish the social
cost—the suffering that overwhelmingly and almost exclusively be-
falls the popular classes and then extends to broad middle sectors
of society, and even, less rigorously and in a different way, the domi-
nant classes.

It could seem that the concessions being made by the dominant
classes are indicative of a greater detachment on their part. After
all, by continuing to fight they would suffer less than the popular
classes. Indeed, it could seem that, in making their concessions, the
dominant classes are demonstrating a spirit of magnanimity. After
all, they have reasons for confidence in their strength, which, en-
hanced by help from the outside, from the North, would crush the
guerrillas, so that the dominant classes would have complete power
over the country.

I do not believe, however, in the magnanimity of the dominant
classes as such{ T he existence of magnanimous individuals is possi-
ble, and demonstrable—among members of the dominant classes—
but not of the dominant classes as a class this «S the

Historical conditions have simply place chat lass today in a posi-
tion in which the peace accord has become a moment in the strug-

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 197

gle, for them as for the popular classes under arms. It is a moment
in the struggle, not the end of the struggle. The popular forces need
to be—and I am sure that they are, to judge by what I heard from
some of their leaders—on the alert, at the ready, eyes wide open,
ready for anything. They must not “doze off,” as if nothing could
happen while they “sleep.” They must not demobilize, fail to keep
prepared, under pain of being crushed.

At all events, this way of confronting the truce (nor is it a truce
that is always explicit on the part of the parties to the conflict)—
truce as a moment in the struggle, as an attempt at building or
inventing a peace from which might result a different, democratic
experiment—reveals or proclaims a new historical phase. But this
is not a “new history,’ without social classes, without the struggle
between them, without ideology, as if, suddenly, by some sleight of
hand, the social classes, their conflicts, their ideologies, had sud-
denly been swished away by the sleeves of some great magician’s
black cloak.

Such things do not occur, of course, especially in the domain of
politics, except as engendered in the interplay of tactics in which
two sides, in function of their respective strategic positions, measure
their own stride against the steps taken by the other side. At bottom,
the antagonists regard their reciprocal concessions as lesser evils,
which could one day, in retrospect, for one side or the other, be
seen to have been victories.

If it had already been difficult, some years before, for the Left to
take power with impunity, never mind the means by which it had
done so, as in Chile, Nicaragua, or Grenada, now, after the decline
of “realistic socialism’—which is not socialism, let me repeat—when
conservatism had become even more bold the world over—then the
limits on the Left, for the short term, have shrunken still further.

Realistically, then, to strike a peace in El] Salvador, despite its
obvious limitations, and despite, at times, larger concessions than
one could have hoped to have to make, is the best way, because it
is the only way, to make advances. It is the best way for the people
to assert themselves, to win a voice, a presence, in the reinvention
of their society, it is the best path to the lessening of injustice. For
that matter, it is the best way of creating, and gradually consoli-
dating, a democratic lifestyle, in which a process might appear that

198 - PAULO FREIRE

would even enable those accustomed to holding all power in their
hands to learn that what seems to them to be a threat to their
privileges—understood by them, of course, as inalienable rights—
is only the implementation of the rights of those who have come to
be forbidden to exercise them. A learning process might appear
whereby the powerful would learn that their privileges, such as that
of exploiting the weak, prohibiting the weak from being, denying
them hope, are immoral, and as such need to be eradicated. It
might be a learning process, at the same time, for the crushed, the
forbidden-to-be, the rejected, that would teach them that, through
serious, just, determined, untiring struggle, it is possible to remake
the world. The oppressed may learn that hope born in the creative
unrest of the battle, will continue to have meaning when, and only
when, it can in its own turn give birth to new struggles on other
levels.

And finally, it may be learned that, in a new democratic process,
it is possible gradually to expand the space for pacts between the
classes, and gradually consolidate a dialogue among the different—
in other words, gradually to deepen radical positions and overcome
sectarian ones.

(In no way, however, does this mean, for a society with this sort of
living experience of democracy, the inauguration of a history without
social classes, without ideology, as a certain pragmatically postmod-
ern discourse proclaims. In fact, the truth is just the opposite, or
nearly the oppose eae as I see it, has a different, sub-
stantially democratic way of dealing with conflict, working out its
ideology, struggling for the ongoing and ever more decisive defeat
of injustice, and arriving at_.a.democyatic socialism/ There is a post-
modernity of the Right; but there is a postmodernity of the Left, as
well, nor does the latter—as is almost always insinuated, if not in-
sisted—regard postmodernity as an altogether special time that has
suppressed social classes, ideologies, Left and Right, dreams, and
utopias./And one of the basic elements of the postmodernity of the
Left is the reinvention of power—and not its mere acquisition, as
with modernity.

his postmodern moment that we are living in the 1990s is not
a time so utterly special that it knows no more social classes}—not
in Switzerland any more than in Brazil, and certainly not in El

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 199

Salvador. In fact, this is why one of the learning processes that a
progressive postmodernity calls upon us to accept is the process of
our apprehension that the total victory of the revolution in the pres-
ent does not guarantee its existence in the future. A revolution can
perish at the very height of its power, which it has simply acquired,
and not reinvented, not re-created. In that case, it is lost on account
of the excessive arrogance of its certitudes, and the inevitable lack
of humility that such certitudes entail: it is lost by virtue of the
authoritarian exercise of its power. It is lost by virtue of its
modernity.

Concessions, then, are the best way of coming to win, only if,
sooner or later, they actually win the fight that is never over and
done. Winning the fight is a process of which it can never be said,
“We've won, period.” When this point is absolutized, the revolution
is paralyzed.

We visited various regions of the country, and participated in
regional education seminars in two of them. We paid a visit to a
lovely clearing in the forest, a kind of theatrical stage on which the
guerrillas met, then as today, to engage in discussion, dreaming,
self-appraisal, recreation.

We attended a “culture circle” session at which armed activists
were learning to read and write, learning to read words while doing
a rereading of the world. The process of writing and reading the
word, which is what they were doing in the course of their under-
standing of discourse, emerged from, or was part of, a larger, more
meaningful process—that of the taking up of their citizenship, the
taking of history into their hands/ This is what I have always been
for, this is why I have always fought for literacy compaigns that,
being so acutely aware of the social nature of of the acquisition of
language, I have never dichotomized from the political process of
the battle for citizenship. /What I have never been for is a “neutral”
approach to literacy, a sheer shower of syllables, which, to boot,

would start right out with the language of the educators rather than
with that of the educands. We conversed with the combatants, and
with their comandante, in a climate of hope.

In just such a climate of hope we spent nearly an entire day in a
kind of new city, peopled by exiles who had managed to survive in
a neighboring country.

200 - PAULO FREIRE

From the peak of an elevation, we descried a whole world to be
built differently.

We took lunch with the leader of the brand-new city-in-the-
middle-of-nowhere, and he spoke to us of what this return to their
country was coming to mean for all of them, men and women, what
it meant to them to participate in the transformations that would
be needed in order for El Salvador to change its “face,” and gradually
become a less-wicked, less-unjust society, little by little more
decent, more human and humane.

This dream-——as far as we could gather from our conversations,
and by reading the wonderful book by Ana Guadalupe Martinez, *
one of the leaders of the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacién
Nacional, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front or
FMLN, as well as on the visit we made to Radio Venceremos (We
shall prevail)—this dream is the utopia for which these Salvadoran
militants had begun to struggle from the outset. But they had set
out for the clash and the fray without ever scorning education and
its importance for the battle itself. As far as was possible, they were
avoiding both the illusions of an idealism that ascribes a power to
education that it does not have, and the mechanistic objectivism
that denies any value to education until after there is a revolution.
I do not know that I have ever found, in popular groups, a stronger
expression of a critical confidence in educational practice. The same
must be said of their liderancas.

I cannot refrain from transcribing here the dedication I read
on a piece of artwork on the occasion of my visit to the FMLN
headquarters:

Paulo Freire

With your education for liberation, you have contributed to the
very struggle of the Salvadoran people for social justice.

With gratitude and respect,

FMLN, July 1992

*Ana Guadalupe Martinez, Las cdrceres clandestinas (San Salvador: Central
American University, 1992).

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 20l

The harshest difficulties, the wants and needs of the people, the
ebb and flow of the process that depends on so many different factors
for its solidification—none of this diminished in us, in Nita and me,
the hope with which we came to El] Salvador, with which we lived
a week in El! Salvador, and with which we left El Salvador—

—The same hope with which I bring to its conclusion this Peda-
gogy of Hope.

Afterword

Even before he had finished writing this book, Paulo Freire felt that
certain points would require clarification—matters he was touching
on only lightly, or perhaps doing no more than mentioning, without
expansion, because considering them in depth would mean straying
too far from the focus of the book's thematic interest. And so he has
asked me to compose explanatory notes.

It has been an immense joy for me to collaborate in a work of his,
especially as it has meant writing about things I relish so much and
have come to be so involved in, so passionately involved in, lo, these
fifteen years and more: namely, the “fabrics” of the history of Brazil-
ian education.

Some of the notes may be extensive. I do go on. Others may seem
superfluous to the Brazilian reader, but will be helpful to persons
whose language is among those into which this book is already in
the process of being translated. Persons, places, and things with
which we are familiar here may be far less well-known to readers of
other cultures and contexts, men and women of foreign lands. It
could scarcely be otherwise, and I am sure that this state of the
facts calls for a detailed explanation of certain things.

I became more and more intensely involved in my notes every
time I picked up this book, once again to immerse myself in it. I
found myself reliving moments of my childhood, when I knew Paulo
as a student at Oswaldo Cruz Boarding School. Later, in my youth,
he was my “Portuguese teacher,” my language teacher. After I mar-
ried Raul, I lived in Sao Paulo, where I would see him in my parents

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 203

home, in Recife, and follow his work in the creation and application
of the Paulo Freire Literacy Method.

Then came the coup of 1964. From that time on, for a long while,
I had only sporadic notice of him, in Chile, in the United States,
and in Geneva, and of his pedagogical work, which was gaining in
criticality and extension.

I read him for the first time in Spanish. It was a strange experi-
ence. It made me think: “So Brazilian, so Northeastern, so Pernam-
bucan, so ‘Recifian’ a person—all the ways in which I have known
him—and here I am reading him in a foreign language.” It was a
strange thing, and I was surprised and frightened. But then, with
the ears of my imagination, I would hear him, in that familiar voice,
repeating the text in Portuguese, with his gentle tones, powerful
conviction, and ingenious creativity. And these were Northeastern
qualities.

Finally there came his stories, so well told in the present volume,
of the relationship he established, through the intermediary of Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed, with his hearers and readers in the world
outside. These things seemed less easy for me to grasp. But this was
only seeming, since, after all, I had been able to understand his
relationships, these experiences of his, here in Sao Paulo when I
discussed Pedagogy of the Oppressed with my colleagues in the
teaching profession. Our discussions awakened among us, too, re-
flections, conclusions, and hesitations analogous to those he re-
counts in the present book, as he communicates to us the feedback
he has received from various groups on the five continents.

Even without a face-to-face dialogue, then, there was a point in
common between Paulo and me, and now, as I compose these notes,
I feel I have become familiar with it. I am no longer a stranger to
the things, events, and persons of which he speaks. And this, en-
tirely apart from the fact that, over the last five years, I have indeed
been physically present to, and experienced, these persons and
things, in Paulo’s actual company, in Brazil and abroad.

Writing these notes about the streets of Recife, about my father,
Aluizio, about Oswaldo Cruz Boarding school, about Ariano and
Taperod, or about what manha means, or about President Goulart—
all of this has been fascinating to me, as has been, as well, the task
of describing and analyzing what the pedagogical thought of Paulo

204 - PAULO FREIRE

Freire has meant for the history of education since the Second Na-
tional Congress of Adult Education—or the Workers Party adminis-
tration of Sado Paulo today and his incumbency as Municipal
Secretary of Education—or the emotion-charged experience in po-
litical pedagogy that was ours—Paulo’s and mine—in the form of
the visit we paid to the new city of Segundo Montes in El Salvador.

Composing these notes was no mechanical, or “neutral” task,
then. No, there is no such thing here, and it would be impossible
for me anyway—the way I am, the way I am involved in things and
understand the world. These notes are charged with living experi-
ence, with my grasp of the history of Brazilian education, and with
my rebellion against the elitist, discriminatory authoritarianism of
the colonial tradition and the Brazilian slavocracy, still alive and well
among us.

I am fed up with bans and prohibitions: bans on the body, which
produce, generation after generation, not only Brazilian illiteracy
(according to the thesis I maintain), but an ideology of ban on the
body, which gives us our “street children,” our misery and hunger,
our unemployment and prostitution, and, under the military dicta-
torship, the exile and death of countless Brazilians. The ban on
Paulo Freire’s body (along with his ideas), which was forbidden, for
fifteen long years, in Brazil. The ban, the prohibition, imposed on
him and on so many other Brazilians—which, by way of paradoxical
reaction, led him to write Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the book that
disallows all of the ban forms reproduced in Brazil down through
the centuries and indicates the possibility of persons liberation. And
it is all brought to completion in the present Pedagogy of Hope.

These are the things that have stimulated me in writing these
notes. And so I have committed to these notes my emotions, my
knowledge of the history of Brazilian education—and especially, my
reading of the world, whose orientation is in terms of this triangle:
prohibition, liberation, and hope.

ANA MARIA ARAUJO FREIRE

Notes

1. One of the most important of Freire’s categories, the inspirer of such
powerful reflections in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope,
is the concept of “untested feasibility.” Little discussed, and, I daresay, little
studied, this category embraces a whole belief in the “possible dream,” and
in the utopia that will come once those who make their own history wish
it so. These hopes are so characteristic of Freire.

For Freire, human beings, as beings endowed with consciousness, have
at least some awareness of their conditioning and their freedom. They meet
with obstacles in their personal and social lives, and they see them as
obstructions to be overcome. Freire calls these obstructions or barriers
“limit situations. ”

Men and women take a number of different attitudes toward these “limit
situations.” They may perceive the barriers in question as obstacles that
cannot be removed. Or they may perceive them as obstacles they do not
wish to remove. Or they may perceive them as obstacles they know exist
and need to be broken through. In this last case, they devote themselves
to overcoming them.

Here, there has been a critical perception of the “limit situation.” And
so the persons who have understood it seek to act: they are challenged,
and feel themselves challenged, to solve these problems of the society in
which they live, in the best possible manner, and in an atmosphere of hope
and confidence. To this end, these persons have separated themselves,
epistemologically, taken their distance from, that which was objectively
“unsettling” and “encumbering” to them, and have objectified it. Only
when they have understood it in depth, in its essence, detaching it from
its contingent factuality, from its sheer concrete “being there,” can it be

206 - PAULO FREIRE

seen as a problem. As something “perceived” and “detached” from daily
, life, it becomes the “detached-and-perceived,” or the “perceived de-
~ tached.” As such, it cannot, it must not, abide. Thus it comes to be a
problem-topic—a topic that ought to be, must be, confronted. It ought to
be, needs to be, discussed and overcome.

To the actions required for breaking through “limit situations,” Freire
gives the name, “limit acts.” The name suggests the direction of these
“acts”: the defeat and rejection of the given, of a docile, passive acceptance
of what is “there,” with the attendant implication of a determinate posture
vis-a-vis the world.

“Limit situations,” then, imply the existence of men and women directly
or indirectly served by them, the dominant; and of men and women whose
affairs are “denied” and “curbed,” the oppressed.

The former see the problem topics in their concealment by “limit situ-
ations,” and hence regard them as historical determinants against which
there is no recourse—situations to which one must simply adapt. The
latter, when they clearly perceive these challenging societal topics no
longer in disguise, no longer in their concealment by “limit situations’—
when these problems come to be something “detached and perceived’ —
feel a call to mobilize, to act, and to uncover some “untested feasibility. ”

These latter are those who feel it incumbent upon them to burst through
the barrier in question. How? By solving, dissolving, through action ac-
companied by reflection, these obstacles to the liberty of the oppressed.
By removing the “barrier between being [o ser] and being-moreso [o ser-
mais|,” Freire’s dream so dear. Of course, Freire represents the political
will of all women and men who, as he or with him, have come to be workers
for the liberation of men and women independently of race, religion, sex,
and class.

The “untested feasible” then, when all is said and done, is something
the utopian dreamer knows exists, but knows that it will be attained only
through a practice of liberation—which can be implemented by way of
Freires theory of dialogical action, or, of course (since a practice of libera-
tion does not necessarily make an explicit appeal to that theory), by way
of some other theory bearing on the same ends.

Thus, the “untested feasible” is an untested thing, an unprecedented
thing, something not yet clearly known and experienced, but dreamed of.
And when it becomes something “detached and perceived” by those who
think utopian wise, then they know that the problem is no longer the sheer
seed of a dream. They know the dream can become reality.

Thus, when conscious beings will reflect and act for the overthrow of
the “limit situations,” which have left them—along with nearly everyone

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 207

else—limited to being-in-a-lesser-way, to being-less so, then the untested
feasible is no longer merely itself, but has become the concretization of
that which within it had previously been infeasible.

We have these obstacles, therefore, in our reality, these barriers or
boundaries, these “limit situations,” which, once they are “detached and
‘perceived,” have not prevented some persons from dreaming the dream,
\nonetheless prohibit the majority from realizing the humanization and
concretization of 0 ser-mais, being-in-a-larger way, being-moreso.

2. Colégio Oswaldo Cruz was in operation, under the direction of Alui-
zio Pessoa de Aratijo, from 1923 to 1956, when, to his regret, and that of
all who knew the results he obtained, and who had benefited from contact
with him, the school was shut down. Beyond any doubt, it had been one
of the most important educational activities in the history of education in
the Northeast—indeed, we might say, with all justice and realism, in the
history of Brazilian education.

Known for its strict ethics, and the excellence of its instruction, Recife’s
Oswaldo Cruz (which had no connection with the school of that name in
Sdo Paulo), drew its student body not only from Recife and Pernambuco,
from practically the whole Brazilian Northeast, over an area stretching
from Maranhdo to Sergipe—from practically the whole Brazilian North-
east—who sought an education there on the basis of their confidence in
its principles and educational practices.

As director (as well as Latin, Portuguese, and French teacher), Aluizio
associated experienced professionals with himself from the various fields
of knowledge. Yet he always welcomed the contribution of young, new
teachers, as well. Paulo Freire is one of many examples. It was at Oswaldo
Cruz that Paulo began his work as a teacher of Portuguese. Aluizio’s crite-
rion for the selection of teachers was ever their professional competency,
plus their serious dedication to the act of educating.

Most of the professors of the faculties of nearly all of the departments
that merged in 1946 to form the first Federal University of the State of
Pernambuco, were chosen from among the teachers at Colégio Oswaldo
Cruz.

An utterly committed educator, Aluizio built his Colégio into what for
the time was an innovative and progressive educational institution. He
introduced coeducation as early as 1924. It was likewise at this boarding
school that students from other religious backgrounds, especially Jewish
(Jews had no school of their own in Recife until the 1940s), received their
moral and academic formation.

Colégio Oswaldo Cruz had three science laboratories—for biology, phys-
ics, and chemistry, respectively, housed in three amphitheaters the like of

208 - PAULO FREIRE

which many schools and colleges in the country still today may only dream.
Its collection of historical and geographical maps, and its library, were up
to date and of a high quality. There were bands, orchestras, choral groups,
and, for the girls, ballet halls. Its students established student guilds and
other organizations, and published newspapers and magazines. Examples
of the latter would be the Sylogeu and the Arrecifes.

Students and teachers who had studied at Colégio Oswaldo Cruz in
Recife included nationally and even internationally recognized scientists,
jurists, artists, and politicians like (to name only some of the most outstand-
ing) José Leite Lopes, Mario Schemberg, Ricardo Ferreira, Newton Maia,
Moacir de Albuquerque, Claudio Souto, Ariano Suassuna, Walter Azoubel,
Pelépidas Silveira, Amaro Quintas, Dacio Rabelo, Abelardo and Aderbal
Jurema, Egfdio Ferreira Lima, Hervdsio de Carvalho, Fernando Lira, Vas-
concelos Sobrinho, Odorico Tavares, Evandro Gueiros, Dorany Sampaio,
Etelvino Lins, Armando Monteiro, Jr., Francisco Brenand, Lucflio Varejao,
Sr., Jr., Ricardo Palmeira, Mario Sete and his sons Hoel and Hilton, Valde-
mar Valente, Manoel Correia de Andrade, Albino Fernandes Vital—and
as we have seen, both in the text and in these notes, the author of this
book—individuals representing the most varied ideological vectors, but all
of them persons of solid training and professional competence.

Colégio Oswaldo Cruz, in the person of its director, had no fear of
breaking with the elitist, authoritarian traditions of Brazilian society. Those
who passed its portals knew no discrimination of class, race, religion, or
gender.

3. Writing about one’s own father is not an easy job. But when you feel,
when you know, that, throughout the nearly eighty-three years of his life,
your father was a living example of the human qualities of generosity, solli-
darity, and humility, without any sacrifice of his dignity, it becomes a pleas-
ant, gladsome, and rewarding experience to speak of him.

Said the daily newspaper of Aluizio’s father, Antonio Miguel de Aratijo,
a physician:

He was born at 4:00 A.M. on Wednesday, December 29, 1897. He was
baptized February 21, 1898, by Father Marcal . . . (surname illegible),
the godparents being Urbano de Andrade Lima and his wife, Dona [Ma-
dame] Anna Clara Lyra Lima.

Aluizio Pessoa de Araijo, born in Timbatiba, died in Recife November
1, 1979.

The Pernambucan educator received his academic and religious training
in the (secular) Seminario de Olinda. After completion of the “major

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 209

courses, to his parents sorrow, he cut short his secular formation and
went to Rome to prepare for the priesthood.

A few years later, on June 25, 1925, Aluizio married Francisca de Albu-
querque, known as Genove, who had been his executive assistant ever
since the opening of the (then) Gindsio (Gymnasium) Oswaldo Cruz. They
became the parents of nine children, and had the joy of celebrating their
fiftieth wedding anniversary, although it had to be without one of their
children, Paulo de Tarso.

The fact of having broken off his priestly studies and married instead
was never an obstacle, in Aluizio, to a life ruled by the norms and principles
of the Roman Catholic Church. On the contrary, he was now led to a more
profound piety—a more authentic religiousness as the guideline of his
private and professional life, which he lived by living his faith and prioritiz-
ing those special qualities of his, generosity and solidarity. Over and above
this, his earnest commitment to ethics and humanism led him to pursue
an educational practice of extreme liberality with all men and women who
sought, needed, and desired to study. And he did it with humility.

From the 1920s right up to the early 1950s, as Recife had so few public
(and therefore free) secondary schools, what Aluizio really did as Director
and proprietor of the COC, as his boarding school was known, was to make
his private institution for all intents and purposes a public one. Without
ever having access to public funds, he granted scholarships, in his own
educational establishment, to many a young person in need.

And when he granted them, he granted them. Never did he permit his
scholarship students to repay, in any way, shape, or form, what he had
bestowed on them out of his personal generosity and in virtue of his social
awareness of the fact that education was everyone's right.

He never let these principles slip from his grasp. He was ever convinced
that this was his “vocation” in the world.

4. The secondary course was the target of legislative material from the
outset of Getilio Vargas’s administration. This material took the form of
two decrees—dated April 1931, and April 1932, respectively—the latter
confirming and consolidating the systematization and manner of organiza-
tion the former had prescribed for this branch of instruction, the second-
ary level.

Throughout Brazilian historical tradition, legislation concerning the
schools had been handed down almost exclusively by way of acts of the
executive power, bypassing the prescribed initiatives of the legislative
branch or of civil society. This reform of the early 1930s, then, raised
eyebrows—all the more so, inasmuch as, after losing the elections, Vargas
had taken power, in November 1930, by means of revolutionary forces that

210 - PAULO FREIRE

rejected, more than anything else, the hegemony of the coffee, Sao Paulo,
and mining aristocracy that had ruled the country throughout almost the
whole republican era.

Technically, it is true, this educational reform on the part of Vargas and
his education minister of that time, Francisco Campos, was innovative. But,
while a new departure in terms of method, it was flawed politically, and
this flawed it through and through. It had not managed to escape the
weight of tradition. It was excessively authoritian and centralized, and toad-
ied to the elitist tastes and tone of the commanding minority of our society.

The provisions of Vargas’s original educational reform prevailed until
1942, throughout his incumbency, except for the period from 1937 on, when
it was replaced by another, even more antidemocratic set of prescriptions.

Secondary instruction was of a traditionally academic mold, and offered
no professional or technical training. It was conceived merely as a bridge
to higher education—quite a paradox in a country that was seeking to
industrialize and had such a need for doing so. The secondary level was
the branch of instruction enjoying the greatest prestige, and prerogatives
thereunto accruing, in political society, as well as in the middle and upper
echelons of civil society, where the still prevailing elitist dreams implanted
by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, with their style of education (in
subjects called the “humanities”), lived on.

The secondary course systematized in 1932, to which Freire refers, set
up two instructional “cycles.” The First Cycle, called the Fundamental
Cycle, was a five-school-year course, and enrolled pupils of both sexes
beginning at the age of eleven, upon successful completion of quite a
rigorious admissions examination covering carefully selected material. The
Second Cycle, which was “college preparatory,” was two school years long,
and was called the Complementary Cycle. Successful completion of the
Fundamental Cycle was a prerequisite for enrollment in the Complemen-
tary Cycle. |

The Complementary Cycle was subdivided into three “sessions,” in func-
tion of the particular “major” the individual high-schooler proposed to
pursue at the university after successful completion of this Second Cycle.
The three sessions, in both public and private high schools, all to be
modeled on Colégio Pedro II—the official model for all secondary-educa-
tion institutions in the country—comprised curricula in, respectively, pre-
law, premedicine, and preengineering.

As there was as yet no “normal” training for teachers at this time—
university-level courses in education—all students inclining to a formation
in the area of the human sciences, or envisaging a career in secondary

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - Q2II1

education, were required to complete the “Pre-Law Secondary Cycle,”
after which they would matriculate in a School of Law.

This is what Freire did. Having no clear idea, as yet, when he enrolled
in the Recife Faculty of Law, in 1943, of becoming an educator, let alone
in 1941 when he began prelaw, still, he felt and knew that he wanted to
be as close as possible to human problems.

5. The SESI—Servico Social da Indtstria—was created by Law fetes
9403 of incumbent President of the Republic Eurico Gaspar Dutra, June
25, 1946.

As it endowed the National Confederation of Industry with particular
powers, enjoining upon it the responsibility of creating, organizing, and
directing the new service, the legal act sets forth certain considerations in
justification of the measure being taken.

Succinctly, the following considerations had led the Executive power to
enact the decretal: “The difficulties created for the social and economic
life of the country by the burdens of the postwar period.” After all, it was
the duty, while not the exclusive duty, of the state to “foster and stimulate
cooperation among classes by way of initiatives tending to promote the
welfare of working men and their families,” as well as to foster the requisite
conditions for an “improvement in the pattern of life.” A further considera-
tion was the availability of the National Confederation of Industry as an
entity among the producing classes for “offering social assistance, as well
as better housing, better nutritional and hygienic conditions for workers,
and indeed, the development of a spirit of solidarity between employees
and employers,” along with the fact that “this program, as an incentive to
a sense and spirit of social justice among classes, will greatly contribute
to the elimination from among us elements favorable to the germination
of divisive influences prejudicial to the interests of the collectivity.”

We see a portrait of the country. It will be interesting to analyze this
material, and point out what the “letter of the law” does not say, that the
spirit of the decree surely contains.

First, the act is unacceptable by reason of its very form.

It comes from the top down, down from the executive branch. Further-
more, it is even more authoritarian than a simple decree would have been:
it is what is called a law decree, that is, a decree that the chief of the
executive branch, in this case the president of the republic, issues with
the force of law, thereby arrogating to himself functions proper to the
legislative branch and exercising them as if they were his own.

Like other Brazilian presidents, Dutra used this mechanism in a manner
so bare-facedly partial to Brazilian centralist authoritarianism that, happily,

912 - PAULO FREIRE

it has now been written out of existence in our bureaucratic apparatus
of state.

The document in question speaks of difficulties arising in the postwar
era. Brazil could have emerged from the war years awash in wealth. After
all, it had been among the countries that supplied stockpiles of various
products essential to a war effort.

Other considerations advanced in the document betray a terror of “com-
munism.” They translate a fear that, one day, some Brazilian regime might
be antagonistic to Northern capitalism, which was ordering all the witch
hunts for “communists.” They camouflage the class struggle. At all costs,
a clear awareness of the existence and nature of the class struggle must
be prevented.

It “asks” a calm, passive acceptance of the crying discrepancies in mate-
rial conditions between owners and employees. “Assistance” is offered, in
lieu of honest confrontation.

Freire took a job with this government. On the face of it, that could
seem a contradiction. But he learned, in this job. After all, he was dealing
with working families of factory, farm, and fishing coast, and—most of all—
he was doing so in a context of the relations imposed by management on
labor. Thus was he enabled to formulate a pedagogical thinking that would
be stamped with those salient characteristics of dialogue, criticality, and
social transformation with which we become so familiar in this book.

6. The Recife Law Faculty, today a department of the Federal University
of Pernambuco, was always one of the political battlegrounds of the Brazil-
ian scene. Many a new idea sprang into being there.

Created along with the Saéo Francisco Square school of S40 Paulo on
August 11, 1827, shortly after Brazil's declaration of independence from
Portugal, this school of law, which initially operated in So Bento Convent
in Olinda, was not established merely as a training ground for individuals
who would come to compose the national juridical apparatus. It was the
alumni of these two schools who, initially, actually forged the Brazilian
apparatus of state.

7. Freire had to leave Brazil and request political asylum when only
forty-three years of age. He was obliged to live outside his native land, far
from his nearest and dearest, for more than fifteen years.

During his time of exile, he lost his mother and many of his friends.
Among the latter were countless political activists who had been in charge
of the “culture circles,” or monitors of the National Literacy Program. They
were not to be spared the tortures and persecutions of the coming years
of military dictatorship.

Thus, paradoxically and ironically, Freire’s departure from our midst at

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE -: 213

the moment in which he was acting and producing so effectively, efficiently,
and enthusiastically, occurred by reason of precisely these qualities in him.

His “sin” was to have taught literacy for the sake of conscientizacado and
political participation. For him, the purpose of literacy was to help the
people to emerge from their situation of domination and exploitation. Once
politicized by the act of reading the word, they could reread, critically, the
world. Such was Freire’s understanding of adult education. His widely used
“Paulo Freire Literacy Method” was based on these ideas, so that it con-
veyed the reality of the unjust, discriminatory society we had built—a
reality that needed to be transformed.

The program on the drawing boards would have brought this to so many
who had been denied the right to schooling. It was wiped out by the
military coup of 1964.

In the gruesome spirit of McCarthyism, and of the National Security
Doctrine, inspired in the North, that had installed itself in Brazil, the
military officers who had seized power destroyed or otherwise neutralized
everything they could get their hands on that they understood to be
“subversive.

In this “new’ reading of the world—old in its tactics of punishment,
abuse, and prohibition—there was no room for Freire.

He who so loved his country and his people was deprived of being-in
his country and being-with his people.

8. The State of Pernambuco is one of the smaller political units of the
federation. Its territory is a narrow strip of land extending from the Atlantic
Ocean to the border of the State of Piaui, and lying between longitude 35°
and 41° west, and latitude 7° and 10° south.

In terms of rainfall, humidity, vegetation, and temperature, it is consid-
ered to be divided into three “zones.” Beginning on the coast: the Zona
da Mata (“Wooded Zone”), Zona do Agreste (“Agrarian, Farming, Rural’),
and Zona do Sertdo (“Hinterland,” the desert region).

The first, where you can still see a little of the Atlantic Forest that
covered it at the time of the Portuguese invasion of American lands in
1500, has torrential rainfall, blistering temperatures, and high humidity.
Even today it is the zone of the canebrakes, in the Portuguese tradition
that made the region that nation’s most abundant source of wealth in the
sixteenth century.

It was the Portuguese colonial adventure that occasioned the deforesta-
tion of so much of this zone. Slave labor drove the mills, and felled the
trees to make room for the brakes, and now sugar (until then thought of
as a “spice”) could pour into the welcoming arms of European markets,
thus sealing the fate of this zone—ecological destruction.

214 - PAULO FREIRE

As we move a few kilometers away from the maritime strand, climatic
conditions modify, with sparser vegetation and diminishing rainfall, all the
way to the border of the Zona de Sertdo.

Vegetation in the Sertdo is limited exclusively to cactaceous plants, espe-
cially the mandacaru or Peru cereus, and xiquexique, other cacti, yielding
what we call a caatinga—the stunted, spare forests we have in the North-
east. Daytime temperatures soar, under a blazing sun, in a blue, cloudless
sky, and plummet at night.

There are no trees at all, and of course rainfall is a rarity. The frequent
droughts of the Zona de Sert4o may last months, even years.

The secas, as we call them—the droughts—leave the riverbeds empty
and the populations hungering and thirsting. The soil that has served for
“subsistence farming” splits agape, to receive the misery—the dead live-
stock and all the hopes—of a folk who now know they must migrate to the
Southeast of the country or die.

9. The jangada, the little boat that dots the lovely seascape of Northeast-
ern Brazil, is a catamaran used by small deep-sea fishers to make their
living. At sunset, they sell the days catch—all that they have harvested
from the generous sea of tepid waters that wash the shore in that region
of Brazil. Not that the catch is taken “for free.” No, the risks are great, and
the toil most arduous.

A fragile vessel, the jangada is constructed of a light, porous wood that
floats so high in the water that the little craft will tend not to sink even if
it is awash.

It is composed of five logs of jangada wood, each some four or five
meters in length, joined together to form its ballast by several sticks of
tough, hard wood running across them from one side of the one-and-one-
half to two-meters-wide vessel to the other.

The jangada has a big cloth sail, traditionally white, which the wind
“hits” to propel the raft over the water. It carries almost no paraphernalia
other than the fishing trap and the sail—only a rustic wooden tiller, a creel
(the samburd, a round wicker basket to hold the fish after they have been
retrieved), and a wooden dipper used to keep the sail wet and impermedvel,
or “wind-proof.” And an anchor—as rustic as everything and everyone else
in the jangada, a stone tied to the end of a rope of caroéd fibers that stops
the jangada where the jangadeiro wants it to stop, wherever his intuition
tells him that it will be here that he will find the riches of the sea that are
the object of his quest.

10. The fishers of the Northeast call it pescaria de ciéncia (scientific
fishing), their rudimentary elementary method of deep-sea navigation that
consists of the following. The fishers select three points of reference. Two

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 215

of them will be, for instance, a hillock, or the steeple of a church—anything
that stands out from the landscape at a distance. The third will be the
edge of the coast itself, the waterline. These three points enable the fisher
to head for the open sea on a course as nearly vertical as possible with the
coastline, and several kilometers in distance, as he navigates with the naked
eye, keeping equidistant from the two previously chosen inland points.
Then, at this spot where he has come, from where everything on shore
merges into a single, vague point, and where his intuition and sensitivity
have told him, “Ah, this is it. . . this is a good place,” he lowers his trap.
Several days later, without having left any sign for himself (or for strangers)
of how his creative wit has served him here, he sails to the same spot and
draws in his net and his catch.

The “hand tool” employed amidst this scientific cognition of his (this
concept of an isosceles triangle), the instrument applied between his two
acts of “measuring” and determining the right point for gaining the fruits
of the sea, is the covo, or wicker fish trap. Constructed of flexible, but
tough forest vine, or cipd, the covo is a large box attached to a stone that
drags it deep down into the water. The covo floats at this underwater point,
which the fisher has selected, for the time needed to fill with the fish,
prawn, and other “fruit” that enter there, never to leave again for the
freedom of the immense sea waters.

The techniques are very rudimentary, of course. But they are the effort
of common sense, of the reading of the world done by the humble folk of
the seashore, to make of observation and experience the route to a knowl-
edge analogous to our own scientific cognition.

Cognition like this “scientific fishing” is the object of study of UNICAMP
ethnoscientist Marcio D’Olme Campos, who works among the fishers of
Sao Paulo state, although in terms of different conceptions from those set
forth here (see note 36).

11. Caicara is the name we in the Brazilian Northeast give to a shelter
built from fibers of the coconut trees growing along the ocean, which serve
to protect fishing boats and their equipment. It is also a place where the
fishers gather to talk and to rest between stints on the open sea.

12. When an “educator,” parent or teacher, obliges a victim to extend
his or her hands, palms up, and beats them, generally with a palm switch,
the assailant inflicts more than pain. The stripes (“to pay you back,” the
child hears) nearly always swell up, in the aftermath of this disciplinary
act, into enormous “cakes’—as the people call them, due to the fact that
they rise like cakes in an oven.

13. The military governments of Brazil were headed by the following
officers: General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, from April 15,

216 - PAULO FREIRE

1964, to March 15, 1967; from the latter date to August 31, 1968, when
illness obliged him to resign, General Arthur da Costa e Silva; replacing
him on that date, a military junta composed of General Aurélio Lyra Ta-
vares, Brigadier General Marcio de Souza e Melo, and Admiral Augusto
Rademaker Grunerwald, to October 30, 1969; Emilio Garrastazu Médici
from that date to March 15, 1974; Ernesto Geisel from then to March 15,
1979; and Jodo Batista Figueiredo, from this last date to March 15, 1985.

14. It will be well for us to indicate the current (September 1992) struc-
ture of education in Brazil since the enactment of the new Law of Direc-
tives for and Foundations of National Education by the National Congress.
Drafted and implemented in 1971, during the harshest times of the mili-
tary dictatorship, the created three scholastic levels were the First Degree,
lasting eight school years, and comprising the old primary school and gym-
nasium curriculum; the Second Degree, of three or four years, depending
on the branch of courses in which the student is enrolled; and the Third
Degree, known as the “upper’ level, the university level, offering curricula
of three to six years duration.

In Brazilian historical tradition, regular instruction included elementary
or primary instruction, the middle level (secondary, commercial, normal,
agricultural, industrial, and nautical), of which six branches only the first-
named, the secondary, was not geared to training in a particular trade, but
was college preparatory; and the upper level, which we cannot call the
university level, because the oldest institution of that level of instruction
among us recognized as such is the University of SAo Paulo, created by the
government of Sdo Paulo State in 1934.

The primary schools to which Freire refers were those that, of course,
offered the first level of instruction, and officially were supposed to educate
all children between seven and ten years of age.

15. “Meridionate them” [suled-los]. Paulo Freire has used the term
sulear-se—which does not actually exist in dictionaries of the Portuguese
language—to call readers’ attention to the ideological connotation of the
terms orientar-se, to “orientate oneself” (lit., point oneself to the east,
get one’s bearings from the east), orientagdo (orientation),” nortear-se (a
synonym for orientar-se, but in terms of the north rather than the east),
and suchlike derivatives of the Portuguese words for “east” and “north.”

The North is the First World. The North is on top, in the upper part of
the world. The North lets knowledge “trickle down” to us in the Southern
Hemisphere, where we “swallow it without checking it against local con-
text” (cf. Marcio D’'Olme Campos, “A Arte de Sulear-se,” in Interacdo
Museu-Comunidade pela Educagéo Ambiental, Manual de Apoio ao Curso

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 217

de Extensdo Universitdria, ed. Teresa Scheiner [Rio de Janeiro: Uni-Rio /
Tacnet Cultural, 1991], pp. 59-61).

The first thinker to alert Freire to the ideology implicit in terms like
these, calculated to mark different levels of “civilization” and “culture”
between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, between the “creative”
hemisphere and the “imitative” one (and mark them quite to the positivist
taste), was the physicist we have just cited, Marcio Campos, who is cur-
rently working in ethnoscience, ethnoastronomy, and “ambiential edu-
cation. ”

Let me quote the words with which Campos himself, in the book just
cited, sets forth his conception and denunciation of the pretended intrinsic

superiority of intelligence and creative power of the men and women of
the North:

Universal history, and geography, as understood by our Western society
in its scientific tradition, mark out certain spaces and times, periods and
eras, on the basis of internalistic, indeed ideological reference points
very much to the taste of the central countries of the planet.

Many are the examples of this state of affairs, which is imposed on the
education of the peripheral countries—that is, the countries of the Third
World—as a perfectly casual, textbook kind of thing, a matter of sim-
ple information.

In our instructional materials, we find the earth represented on globes
having the north pole at the top. Maps and their legends likewise respect
this convention, which the Northern Hemisphere finds so appropriate,
and are displayed in a vertical plane (on a wall) instead of a horizontal
plane (on the floor or on a table). Thus, folks in Rio are heard to say that
they are going “up” to Recife; and for all anyone knows they might think
there is a north on every mountain peak since “north is on top.”

In questions of spatial orientation, especially with respect to the cardi-
nal points of the compass, the problems are equally grave. The “practical”
rules taught here are practical only for persons situated in the Northern
Hemisphere, who, in their particular situation, will want to septentrio-
nate (north-ate) themselves so to speak, by analogy with the word orien-
tate (east-ate), meaning getting one’s bearings from the east.

The imposition of these conventions on our hemisphere establishes
confusion with respect to the concepts of above and below, north and
south, and, above all, principal and secondary, and upper and lower.

At any local reference point of observation, the rising sun, appearing
in the direction of the east, founds an orientation. In the Northern Hemi-
sphere, the polestar, Polaris, the North Star, founds a septentrionation.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the Southern Cross is the perfectly ade-
quate basis for a meridionation (or south-ation).

Despite all this, the practical rule that continues to be taught in our
schools is the rule of the north: that is, you mentally place yourself with

218 - PAULO FREIRE

the rising sun to the east on your right, with the west on your left, the
north straight ahead “up there,” and the south behind you, “down here.”
This thoroughly flawed practical rule provides a corporeal schema that,
at night, leaves us with our back to the Southern Cross, the fundamental
constellation for the act of meridionation. Would it not be better for us
to position ourselves with the east on our left? [Emphasis added]

Having cited this lengthy, but indispensable, passage, I should like to
call attention to a few words in it that, few as they are, nevertheless say a
great deal, and say it very powerfully. They are not abstract words; rather,
they imply a particular behavior, and an attitude adopted by the person
who exhibits the behavior. A person practicing this behavior and adopting
this attitude does so because he or she has acquired them concretely.

Let us carry Professor Campos's observations and denunciations a bit
further, then. Let us ask ourselves, with the purpose of stimulating our
own reflection: To be “left with our back to the Southern Cross’—to turn
our back on, to turn around so that we are “left with our back to,” the
Southern Cross, which is the cross on our flag, the symbol of Brazil, a
reference point for us—will this not betoken an attitude of indifference,
contempt, disdain, for our own capabilities to construct, locally, a knowl-
edge that would be ours, and would bear on things local, things concretely
ours? Why is this? How has it arisen and perpetuated itself among us? In
favor of whom? In favor of what? Against what? Against whom, this manner
of reading the world?

Would not that “thoroughly flawed practical rule” be one more form of
alienation infecting our signs and symbols, by way of a knowledge devel-
oped to the point of producing a cognition that turns its back on itself,
and turns, with open heart, gluttonous mouth, and head as hollow as a pot
(waiting to be filled by signs and symbols from elsewhere), so that we end
up as a continent of knowledge developed and produced by men and
women of the North, the “summit,” the “upper part,” the “top”?

16. General Eurico Gaspar Dutra was President of the Republic from
January 31, 1946, to January 31, 1951, in the period immediately following
the dictatorship of Gettlio Vargas—which the general, alongside so many
civilians and other military had helped to build from 1930 onward, when
the cowboy politician began his struggle for the power that he finally won
and held onto for fifteen years.

In October 1945 Dutra was one of the dictator's overthrowers. As soon
as he was elected president, he initiated, ironically enough, the period we
refer to as that of our Brazilian “redemocratization.”

17. Vasco da Gama is an overcrowded “popular” or lower-class neighbor-
hood of the then peripheral zone of Recife.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 2]9

18. In the Northeast, we use the word here translated “yard” [oitdo] to
designate the stretch of ground running along the side of a house, between
the house and the wall of the property on which it has been built. Or the
area running along the side of any building.

For example, when we say “no oit4o da igreja’” (in the oitdo of the church),
we are referring to the little stretch of ground running along the sides of
the church, not the front churchyard or any yard that may lie behind
the church.

A house with oitées livres, then, as the Portuguese reads, is one that
has been built in such dimensions as to leave a space—not necessarily a
very big space, although it could be a quintal, or real yard, too—between
the house and the wall at the edge of the property on which the house has
been erected.

19. In the 1950s, “Arno-brand appliances” were the symbol of the pur-
chasing power of the Northeastern middle class, which in those postwar
years was very limited, especially by comparison with that of its equivalent
in the United States or many European countries—or, for that matter, with
that of southeastern or southern Brazil itself.

This “poor” middle class of the Northeast of those days sought to salvage
some prestige, and respect for its purchasing power, by purchasing and
using at home a line of name-brand electrical appliances produced in Brazil
under the trademark Arno. Anyone who could afford an Arno blender,
vacuum cleaner, or egg-beater—and when they could, they were careful
not to hide the fact!—felt and esteemed themselves to be privileged mem-
bers of the modest Northeastern middle class.

20. Jaboatdo, a city just eighteen kilometers from Recife (and merging
with its outskirts today) was felt in the 1930s to be lying quite a distance
from the Pernambucan capital, due to the precarious conditions of access
to it—almost exclusively by train, on the British-owned Great Western
Railway.

It was there that the Freire family moved in the hope of better days to
come, having been plunged into poverty, like so many other Brazilian fami-
lies, by the New York stock market crash of 1929.

It was from Jabotao too, that, after having lost her husband in 1934,
Tudinha Freire “traveled” daily to Recife in hopes of obtaining scholarship
money for her son Paul. Each evening that she returned with her “I didnt
get it,” her cadet seemed to see his chances of a university education slip
further away.

Desperate, Tudinha made one last attempt, and early in 1937, received
a yes from Aluizio Pessoa de Araijo.

Chancing to pass along Dom Bosco Street, she noticed a sign, on the

220 - PAULO FREIRE

building at number 1013, which read, “Gindsio Oswaldo Cruz” (Oswaldo
Cruz gymnasium, or secondary school). Only in the 1940s was the institu-
tion renamed Colégio Oswaldo Cruz (Oswaldo Cruz boarding school). She
entered the building and asked to speak with the director. And Tudinha's
request was promptly granted—on one sole condition, “that your son, my
newest pupil, likes to study.”

It was in Jaboatdo, where he lived from the age of eleven to twenty, that
Paulo became acquainted with a world of difficulty, in which one lived on
scant financial resources. There were the difficulties arising from his
mother’s untimely widowhood, when society was much less open to a
woman's working outside the home than it is today. And there were the
difficulties he felt personally, “skinny, bony little kid” that he was, in fend-
ing off the hostility of a world that had such little sympathy for the weak
and impoverished.

But it was also in Jaboataéo that he learned to play soccer, which was an
exciting experience for him. And it was there that he swam in the Jaboatao
River, where he watched poor women, squatting, and washing and beating
against the rocks either their own families clothes or those of more wealthy
families, for whom they worked. It was there, again, that he learned to
sing and whistle—things he still loves to do today to relieve the weariness
that comes from intellectual activity, or from the tensions of everyday life.
He learned to dialogue in his “circle of friends,” and learned sexual appre-
ciation for, “falling in love with” and loving, women. Finally, it was there
in Jaboatao that he learned and assimilated—with a passion!—his studies
of both the popular and the cultivated syntax of the Portuguese language.

Jaboatao, then, was the space-time of a learning process, and of intense
difficulties and joys in life—all of which taught him to strike a harmonious
balance between having and not having, being and not being, capability
and incapability, liking and not liking. Thus was Freire molded in the
discipline of hope.

21. I should like to call the reader's attention to the names of Recife
streets. They are picturesque, regional, lovely, romantic names, nor have
they gone unnoticed by intellectuals, poets, and sociologists (for example,
Gilberto Freire).

The names are not always cheerful ones, but they almost always contain
a preposition, and tell a little story. We may read them on the blue, white-
lettered signs of centuries-old Recife: Rua das Crioulas (Street of the Native
Women), Rua da Saudade (Street of the Longing, for home), Rua do Sol
and Rua da Aurora (Street of the Sun and Street of the Dawn; these are
the streets running along the Capibaribe River in the middle of town,
one along the west bank, the other along the east bank), Rua das Gracas

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 22]

(Thanksgiving Street), Rua da Amizade (Friendship Street), Rua dos Mir-
acles (Street of the Miracles), Corredor do Bispo (Bishop’s Way), Rua das
Florentinas (Street of the Florentine Women), Praca do Chora Menino
(Square of the Little-Boy-Weeping), Rua dos Sete Pecados (Street of the
Seven Sins) or Rua do Hospicio (Hospice Street), Rua dos Martirios (Street
of the Martyrs), Beco da Facada (Stab Alley), Rua dos Afogados (Street of
the Drowned), and so many others.

Rua da Imperatriz (Empress Street), so familiar to all Recifians, which
runs from the intersection of Rua da Matriz (Womb) with Rua do Hospicio,
across Ponte da Boa Vista (Bellevue Bridge, we might say) and becomes
Rua Nova (New Street) is actually—something few of us know—Rua da
Imperatriz Teresa Cristina, named in homage to the consort of the second
and last Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II.

22. Massapé, or massapé, according to the “Aurélio” (Aurélio Buarque
de Holanda Ferreira, Novo diciondrio da lingua portuguesa [Rio de Ja-
neiro: Nova Fronteira, n.d.|, derives most probably from the words massa,
“mass” or “dough,” and pé, “foot.” If this is its etymology, this clay would
receive its name from the powerful clutch it applies to the feet of anyone
attempting to walk in it. Peculiar to the Brazilian Northeast, massapé is
calcareous, almost always black, and ideal for sugar-cane cultivation” (Aure-
lio, p. 902).

23. A pinico or penico is a chamber pot, a small vessel used in a bedroom
at night as a urinal before homes had modern bathrooms with flush toilets.

The popular strata use the expression pinico do mundo (the world’s
chamber pot) by analogy for regions of Brazil of extremely high annual
rainfall.

24. A badoque or bodoque is a slingshot—a crude, homemade weapon
frequently built by children and consisting of a forked stick fitted with a
rather broad rubber band between the prongs. The elastic strip is drawn
like a bowstring, then released to launch a small stone from the center of
the strip. It is used as a toy, or, especially among the poorer populations
of the rural zones, for hunting birds for food.

25. The use of the word “archeology,” here, is obviously metaphorical—
as, for that matter, it is so typically of the Freirean taste for figurative
language. The term is used by analogy with its literal meaning. Freire is
speaking here of the archeology he is practicing upon the emotions of his
past. Reliving these emotions, he executes an analysis that searches, that
veritably “digs” into the particular emotions that have caused him to suffer,
to fall into depression.

This archeology, then, is not the one French philosopher Michel Fou-
cault is referring to when he uses the term.

922 - PAULO FREIRE

96. Anyone from the Northeast of Brazil—or of Africa, Freire adds—
knows the scent of earth.

In Recife, to whose soil the educator is referring, when the hot, humid
topsoil is rain-soaked, it exudes a strong scent of moisture and heat, remi-
niscent of the scent exhaling from a woman's body—or a man’s, for that
matter—when stimulated by the sensuality of tropical climes.

27. Freire had been friends with Paulo de Tarso Santos ever since the
latter had invited him to head a national literacy program.

The 1961 Law of Directives for and Foundations of National Education,
with its decentralizing tendencies, had a certain inhibiting influence on
campaigns of national scope. But one evening President Joao Goulart at-
tended a literacy course graduation, in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte.
There he had the opportunity to observe how well Freire’s team worked.
And so he conceived the notion of breaking with the new orientation in
educational policy and assigning all initiatives in educational practice to
the responsibility of federal agencies alone.

With the government taking this décision, the sensitivity of Paulo de
Tarso, now minister of education—known today, as well, for the beauty and
expressiveness of his painting, to be seen where Brasilia stands as a symbol
of the early, rebellious years of the 1960s—led him to create the Programa
Nacional de Alfabetizacgdo, the National Literacy Program.

It fell to Freire, then, to coordinate that program, which was supposed
to teach five million Brazilians to read and write in two years. Every indica-
tion was that this would bring about a shift in the balance of political
power—as indeed was the intention of the approach being used. After all,
the Paulo Freire Method now being officially implemented sought not to
impart literacy mechanically, but to politicize the persons learning to read
and write.

With this societal swerve to the left in prospect, the conservative elite,
enlisting the support of certain sectors of the middle class, proclaimed the
Paulo Freire Method, now being officially implemented, “highly subver-
sive.” And of course it was, although not from the perspective of the
dominated.

The dominant, ignoring the real needs of the people, which called for
greater seriousness in the business of education, were in dismay—at the
method, its author, and Goulart’s populist government itself.

With the military coup of April 1, 1964, one of whose main targets was
to keep the people from acquiring use of the written language, the program
was quashed, and its mentors persecuted. The method had failed to retain
the alienated and alienating characteristics of earlier literacy campaigns.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 223

For many of Freire’s associates, then, as for himself, the choice was prison
and torture, or exile.

28. Cidade-dormitério (bedroom city) is a Brazilianism denoting munici-
palities most of whose families have their breadwinner going to work every
day in another town, generally to neighboring cities that are larger or
whose employment opportunities are more abundant. These working peo-
ple return from their distant tasks so late each day that it is already time
to retire for the night.

Freire has obviously used the term as a metaphor, meaning that, at that
moment of which he speaks, intellectuals were scurrying to Santiago from
various parts of the world, seeking to enhance their own politicization, and
to discuss “Latin Americanness’ and the Christian Democracy of Chile.

29. Manha (wiles, craftiness) expresses a certain quite Brazilian behavior
in which, unwilling or unable to confront another person, or some bother-
some or difficult situation, a person attempts to camouflage the fact or
situation with the strategem or artifice of idle gossip, or noncommittal,
casual chatter that is neither positive nor negative with respect to the
matter under discussion. The purpose of the “wily one’ is to stall for time,
and thereby manage to draw some advantage for himself or herself without
being explicit about that intent. The person exercising manha plays with
words—-and often enough, plays make-believe with his or her own person—
in a superficial, false engagement that seeks to escape the reality of the
situation.

In Freire’s understanding, manha is all of this, and one thing more: a
necessary defense tactic in the cultural and political resistance of the
oppressed.

30. Josué de Castro, a celebrated Pernambucan physician, after careful
research of the diets of the Northeastern populations, has drawn up what
came to be called the crab diet. The name comes from the fact that the
crab is the typical crustacean of the lands of the mangroves, and one of the
most important sources of nutrition for the most impoverished strata of
the population of these areas. It is found in abundance where it likes to
live best, alongside the palafittes, the pile structures built over the sloughs
where the mangroves grow, and its meat is of high nutritional value.

Castro's most important book, known throughout the world, is Geografta
da fome (Geography of hunger). Shockingly realistic, it paints the portrait
of the hunger and the struggle for survival of the populations in the Brazil-
ian Northeast to whom survival is forbidden.

31. Minas Gerais (General Mines) is one of the federated units or states
of Brazil, and is located in the Southeast (latitude 14°-22°, longitude 41°-
51°). Its name derives from the fact that, within its present territory, toward

224 - PAULO FREIRE

the middle of the eighteenth century, the great gold deposits were discov-
ered, as well as, later, those of many other precious metals.

32. PUC-SP is the familiar abbreviation, amoung us Brazilians, for the
Pontificia Universidade Catdélica de S40 Paulo: Sao Paulo Pontifical Catho-
lic University.

33. What we call a favela, in Brazil, here translated “slum,” is an agglom-
eration of shacks inhabited by the poor and originally constructed of dis-
carded building materials, old lumber, sheets of zinc, scrap iron, and so on.
Until very recently, favelas were entirely without running water, electricity,
sewer systems, refuse collection, or public transportation.

The first favelas were erected toward the end of the last century, by
communities of emancipated slaves. Unemployed, possessing no tools or
skills, they invaded the hilly areas of the large cities, at first, to settle
there. Later, abandoned in the streets, they wandered to the inner city
for survival.

Many of the favelas that swell the large Brazilian cities are no longer
among the hills (which have become the bourgeoisie’s favorite place to
live). Now they are to be seen along streets or streams, as well, or on
private urban terrain they have occupied in their “invasion of the land,” or
under viaducts—indeed, in any abandoned area in which they find it possi-
ble to install themselves, in small or large family groups, and gain a feeling
of being closer to employment and/or civilization.

Brazil's largest favelas are to be found scattered across the hills of Rio
de Janeiro, where the first emanicipated slaves came in large numbers.
The Roginha favela counts more than 500,000 inhabitants. Despite the
huge number of shacks, and the promiscuity that translates their inhabi-
tants abandonment by society, even the denizens of the favelas are gaining
politicization, often enough with the assistance of pastoral teams of the
Catholic Church, and are beginning to organize in neighborhood associa-
tions that vindicate their right to public services.

In the Roginha favela, as in so many others, violence and hostility is on
the increase—in response, it seems to me, to the centuries-old exclusion
from social life of those Brazilians who have been obliged merely to “mark
off the days of their lives.”

Such is the revenge wrought by the oppressed on their oppressors. Today
we are paying the price: in our favelas we have one of our most serious
social problems, and it calls for urgent, definitive solutions.

Among the solutions would be agrarian reform. Brazil is just as colonial
today as it was in the sixteenth century, when it was divided into huge
estates called latiftindios—the hereditary “captaincies’—in the naive hope

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 225

entertained by Portugal that these “lands that grow anything you plant”
could become a populated, productive region.

The immense latifindios, barren and uninhabited, each the private do-
main of a single family, are preventing the creation in our country—which
is one of the few modern capitalist nations in the world, and, incredibly,
the eighth economic power worldwide—of a more humane, more rational
distribution of these vast expanses (not that such a distribution has ever
been seriously attempted).

In reality, the authorities today, especially the mayors, have to deal with
these clandestine clusters of shacks, the eyesore of nearly all of the large
cities of Brazil. City hall is faced with the task of providing decent living
conditions for the persons who are obliged to live there.

A determined political will must strike an alliance with technological
solutions. Given Brazil's current economicosocial structure, it will be im-
possible to do away with the thousands of favelas scattered across the
country.

In the city of Sdo Paulo, the current municipal adminstration is at-
tempting to improve the conditions of the favelas—but only of those that
have sprung up on terrain solid enough to bear the physical weight of a
large number of homes and persons. Favelas that have been erected on
terrain vulnerable to landslides and caveins are discouraged. The favelas
are no longer the stopping-off place once used by the migrants on their
way to establish themselves in the economic life of this metropolis.

As we all know today, politicians and plain citizens alike, the favela is
the only available space in the city of Sao Paulo for working families that
have arrived in recent years. Saturated and swollen by a population over-
flow (the census says around 10 million, but the actual population is over
12 million) the city is simply out of room. And so the newcomers have
been obliged to go to live among the destitute, outcast, old residents of
the favelas, who were condemned to live in them more than a century ago.

The favelados, the favela people, of the city of Sao Paulo have mounted
a campaign for the legalization of their homes and, and of their occupation
of the land on which these homes stand. Nowadays most of the dwellings
are of brick or cement block, and are roofed with tiles. Countless are
the societies of “Friends of the Neighborhoods” who set up adult literacy
programs in collaboration with the Municipal Secretariate of Education,
and at the same time lobby municipal authorities with a view to obtaining
other public services.

The goal of the favelados, then, is to make their de facto possession of
their homes a de jure ownership. They feel that this would make it possible
to urbanize the favelas, and thus improve their public services. A large

226 - PAULO FREIRE

number of Sado Paulo favelas now have water, electricity, and in some cases,
a sewer system.

The Sado Paulo municipal budget is the third largest governmental bud-
get in the country (after the federal budget and that of the state of which
it is the capital, Sao Paulo State). So Paulo is a dynamic pole of the national
economy and the cultural center of the nation. Paradoxically, it is also home
to a population, according to city hall records (1992), of some one million
favelados, in 1,790 favelas.

34. Like the favelas, the cortigos (beehives) represent more than just a
housing problem. They are symptomatic of even broader and more serious
social problems.

Corticos are houses inhabited by a number of families at once, each
family leasing some little part of the house or building in order to make
their home there. They may lease them from the owners themselves, or
(more commonly) from intermediaries who sublet them.

The first cortig¢os were old mansions, standing in the center of town,
where affluent families once lived. The latter, obliged to move to a better
neighborhood far removed from the great problems of the inner city, where
violence now reigns, have abandoned their antique dwellings with their
numberless rooms of all sizes to the lower or very-low-middle classes to
make their homes in. Today the cortigos have spread practically all over
the city, and consist, often enough, of far more modest houses than those
noble old mansions.

Promiscuity is rampant, of course, as are the great risks generated by
the absence of hygienic living conditions, and the precarious physical con-
dition of both the aristocratic old mansions and the new corticos.

Estimates by the municipal housing secretariat, SEHAB-HABI, indi-
cate, for Sao Paulo, in 1992, 88,200 “beehive” homes, housing a total of
three million persons.

Sometimes a family does not even have an entire apartment to itself. It
may share it with other families, occupying it in eight- or twelve-hour shifts,
especially in the inner city, where the “beehive clientele” is to be found.

The city of Sao Paulo, like nearly all large Brazilian cities, has part of
its population living in these conditions, imposed on them by an unjust
distribution of the national income.

35. The upper-middle and upper-class neighborhoods of the city of Sao
Paulo known as the Gardens, which were originally divided into Jardim
América, Jardim Europa, and Jardim Paulista (Garden America, Garden
Europe, Garden Sao Paulo), today form a single whole. Their long, tree-
lined boulevards, with their trees, sidewalks, lawns, and gardens, are lined
with great, lovely, well-constructed houses set amidst huge, flowery gar-

J

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 227

dens, and apartment buildings where good taste, comfort, and luxury are
in abundance.

The Gardens are at the opposite extreme from the favelas and the
corticos.

36. Ethnoscience is the name used for their practice by the team of
Unicamp researchers (of the University of Campinas, at Campinas in Sdo
Paulo state) to which Marcio Campos belongs. These investigators ply their
various sciences under a common “ethnoscientific” umbrella. What they
have in common is that they do precisely an ethnography of the cognition
and technology (hence an “ethnotechnology”) of various distinct cultural
contexts. Ethnoscience, then, is an academic science practiced upon an-
other science, that of another culture. Its practitioners study, for example,
various native groups of the territory of Brazil, as well as the caicaras (here
denoting the coastal dwellers themselves) of SAo Paulo State, and thereby
create a body of knowledge that articulates the science and technology of
these peoples with the culture that is theirs as well.

The focus of these scientists’ research is on how these peoples, who live
by fishing, gathering, farming, and hunting, construct their knowledge
and develop their techniques of production and extraction. This knowledge
and these techniques are based on observations, perceptions, and ex-
periences, which in turn are systematized by these peoples, thus com-
ing to form, in the understanding of the ethnoscientists, genuine scien-
tific knowledge.

More conservative academicians regard this knowledge as no more than
a kind of common sense, and hence prescientific knowledge. The eth-
noscientists reject this interpretation, arguing that, on the contrary, the
cognition of these peoples is authentically scientific, in a sense analogous
to the scientific character of the cognition systematized in universities.

(' The two “productions of knowledge” differ only in their argumentation,

premises, methodology, and consequently, in their distinct manners—both
valid—of reading the world. \Whereupon, from these distinct readings of
the world, distinct cognitions constantly emerge whose vehicle is an aware-
ness of the historical situation—not the prehistorical—of each individual,

d every people.

Accordingly, ethnoscientists defend, from their scholarly position in the
broader world, the preservation not only of our planet's biological diversity,
but of its sociocultural diversity as well. Indeed, the latter supports the
former,| which in turn is overwhelmingly composed, by reason of their
geographical predominance, of the peoples of the tropical forests.

37. Freire calls Rio de Janeiro simply “Rio,” which is how we usually
refer to the city. Celebrated for its matchless beauty, bounded by the sea,

228 - PAULO FREIRE

the mountains, the forests, and a lagoon, Rio is one of the most important
cities of the country from a politico-economico-cultural viewpoint. It had
been the capital of Brazil ever since the colonial period, all through the
shift of the dynamic economic pole from the Northeast, with its sugar
production, to the Southeast with the initiation of the “mining cycle,”
when, in 1960, the seat of government of the union was transferred to
Brasflia, that creation of the courage of President Juscelino Kubitscheck
combined with the talents of Oscar Niemeyer and Lticio Costa.

During one period of the military regime, Rio de Janeiro, the “Wonder
City” (as we Brazilians all style it in homage, when we are not “singing” its
actual name), was a city-state, known as Guanabara.

38. Ariano Suassuna, today a member of the Brazilian Academy of Let-
ters, and a brilliant alumnus of Colégio Oswaldo Cruz, was born in Ta-
pero, in the very center of the state of Paraiba, in the hinterland or desert
region, not far from the Serra da Borborema.

For all his funny name and pale skin, Ariano is one of those Northeast-
erners who are glad to be alive, who are caught up in a “taste” for being.
He is a lover of the heat, the rocks, the dry soil, the scrubby vegetation—
but especially, of the wisdom and shrewdness of his native region.

His works deal with the uncultured—the illiterate or semiliterate. They
tell of the dry earth, and the austere men and strong women who forge
their personhhoods in the fire of aggressiveness. They are tales of persons
with calloused hands, and feet discalced by poverty and split by the dryness
of their bony, skinny bodies, which, for days and years, have been out in
the merciless glare of the sun. They expound the naughty wiles and talent
for deception by which these men and women keep at arm’s length from
oppression and the oppressor.

Arianos tales, recounted in the ingenuous speech of the personages of
his Autos (Acts, that is, officially documented actions of a solemn person-
age), in a popular lingo, and in the context and situations that so well
characterize the Brazilian Northeast, have burst the barriers of that region
to conquer the nation and the world, ever since the publication of a work
he composed while still very young, his finest and best loved, the Auto da
Compadecida (Act of the compassionate woman).

39. Freire uses the expression interdicado do corpo (interdiction of the
body) in quotation marks because he is referring to a category that I am
exploring in my research on the history of Brazilian illiteracy.

I have learned through my investigations that the Jesuit-style domination
employed to subdue the Indian, the colonist, or the black, at the beginning
of Brazilian colonization, and render them docile, with a view to swelling
the coffers of the Portuguese crown (and later that of the Society of Jesus

a oe ay a -—_——- —_ —_——_- se =

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 229

itself, which had come here with the official mission of “instructing and
catechizing the Indian”) was so efficient that the dominant class adopted it
as one of the mechanisms it applied in order to reproduce the society of
the few who have knowledge and power, and the many who remain ex-
cluded and prohibited from being, knowing, and “being able.”

I have dubbed this ideology the “ideology of the interdict of the body,”
letting corpo (body) stand, as we do in our language, for the person as the
self. The reason I have called it this is that it explains the phenomenon of
absence from the privileged space of the school in terms of the intrinsic
inferiority, the incompetency, of those who do not occupy that space. Thus
it camouflages (as does any dominant ideological discourse, being the voice
of the dominant class) the authentic reasons for these prohibitions. The
actual reasons for these interdictions, and for this ideological discourse,
stand in dialectical relationship with the political and economic context
of our society, by virtue of the manner in which that society produces
its existence.

A social organization such as ours, which was always colonial, even after
political autonomy (1822), and which still preserves the telltale signs of a
colonial society—a society molded concretely and historically of values,
behaviors, hierarchies, and preconceptions whose guidelines are discrimi-
nation, authoritarianism, and elitism—will necessarily be founded on pro-
hibitions and interdicts.

Thus, from the dawn of Brazilian history down to our very day, these
prohibitions have managed to reserve Brazilian illiteracy for the strata of
lesser social value. Included today are, especially, black women and men,
and white women of the popular strata.

The Jesuits’ reading of the world, during the period of their missionary
work in Brazil (1549-1759), which was inaugurated under the regime of
King John III, exaggerated the extent of incest, nudity, and cannibalism as
practiced here—natives ways of being—and introduced the notion of sin,
inculcating an internalized spirit of obedience, subservience, submission,
hierarchy, imitation, example, and Christian devotion—European values—
which counterbalanced the notion of sin in a dynamic tension. This is the
origin of what I have come to call the ideology of the “interdict of the
body.” (Cf. Ana Maria Aratjo Freire, Analfabetismo no Brazil, cited in
Paulo Freire’s text, above.)

40. “Brazil’s slavocratic past” is still extensively present, in the aristo-
cratic discrimination among the various social classes, and in race and sex
discrimination (although no longer in discrimination based on religion,
which still prevailed among us until a few decades ago).

Brazil comes to be considered by the “culture of the North,” which is

930 + PAULO FREIRE

the culture that allows its knowledge to “drain” down the throats of us
dwellers of the Southern Hemisphere—one of the territories discovered
by the white, civilized European.

In 1500, Brazil was indeed “conquered” by Portugal, and the victors
hung their flag between the altars and masses of the Catholic fathers and
the naked Indians, who by now had been stripped of their taboos and their
alleged “art of oppressing and exploiting.”

There was created, then, in these American lands, a colony, which would
have the function of producing whatever the world division of labor were
to require of it.

Thus, if it was economically inviable to go to the Orient in quest of
spices, the latter would have to be extracted here (in the Amazon region)
or produced here (in the Northeast).

With the selection of what was to be produced in the immense expanses
of fertile lands (sugar), with Holland’s capacity to produce the machinery
needed in the manufacture of this consumer product in such demand in
Europe, and with Portugal's experience, meager but adequate, in that
manufacture, only one problem remained. Who would work on the cane
plantations, and who would mill the cane in the machines? And who would
stir the hot syrup in the caldrons with wooden sticks from the Atlantic
Rain Forest, then dense and luxuriant in the Brazilian Northeast, while
it thickened?

The solution was found in black slavery. Thus, the colonizers went in
quest of the citizens of Africa, purchasing them—as cogs in the wheels of
the sugar machines—from the Dutch, who for a time plied the black slave
trade between Africa and Brazil. From 1534 to 1888, when slavery was
abolished, thousands of blacks entered Brazil—an estimated average of five
thousand souls per year. (I have said “souls,” since the Jesuits who came
here in 1549 regarded the blacks as creatures without souls.)

Despite the fact that they were the “engine masters” heaviest invest-
ment, in this colonial enterprise, the slaves were not on that account han-
dled with care.

It is recorded by our historians that the useful life span of this black
“coal” that fueled the sugar production of the first Brazilian centuries was,
on the average, seven years of slave labor.

Women, less used for the heaviest work, were house slaves, many of
them, performing domestic service in the great houses—those in which
the lord and his family resided.

It was common, in the era of a slavocratic economy in Brazil, for a white
man to “mate. with his black slave women, whether merely to “possess”

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 23l

many women, or to enlarge the most valuable element in the legacy they
would hand on—their slaves—by way of their own descendants.

Thus, a society formed in Brazil that, beginning as elitist and authoritar-
ian, became discriminatory as well, losing all or nearly all respect for
person-to-person relationships—especially, I reassert with the author, for
relationships between different sexes, races, and classes, and above all
between wealthy whites over poor blacks.

41. Quilombo, in its acceptation in this text, has a strong political conno-
tation. A quilombo is a place where the black slaves of Brazil took refuge,
building there, together, in complete solidarity and community, an all but
self-sustaining city. Thus, they founded a genuine culture of resistance to
the barbarizing oppression of slavery.

Décio Freitas, ranking scholar of the black question among us, declares,
in his Palmares: a guerra dos escravos (Palmares: the slaves war): “As long
as there was slavery in Brazil, the slaves revolted, and expressed their revolt
in armed protests whose repetition is unparalleled in the history of any
other country of the New World” (p. 11).

I must warn that official historiography omits such an interpretation. It
denies its realism. It has “reasons” for not understanding and not accepting
the incontestable factuality of the political and revolutionary content of the
slave revolts.

These specious objections only betray an authoritarian, discriminatory
rot or rancidity that the blacks, ever the vanquished of our history, have
been obliged to accept in silence.

Today, black movements, still timid, are appearing here and there in our
country. Under the leadership of certain black men and women, some
blacks are coming to accept their blackness and to value it. Thus they are
forging a new time and a new space for the black race in Brazil. Without
ever ceasing to be Brazilians, in heart and mind, these men and women
are purposely accentuating the cultural marks of their African heritage.
The silence of centuries is at last finding a voice, as Brazilian blacks begin
to assume themselves historically—take responsibility for an autonomy in
the conduct of their own concrete history.

The slave rebels of the sixteenth century rebelled not only in order to
preserve their African heritages; they likewise struggled, for over a century,
against slavery as a system, of which they were the greatest victims whether
they had a clear and critical awareness of it or not.

The black republic of Palmares, the most important of the quilombos,
established in the South of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, was an example
of a productive economy and exemplary social organization of blacks who

932 - PAULO FREIRE

had risen against the slavocratic labor regime on which, along with the
latifandio and the sugar monoculture, the colonial economy rested.
Freitas ends his bruising, beautiful, and highly significant study on the
black insurrections, whose life was from the late sixteenth to the late seven-
teenth century in the Northeast—the most economically dynamic region of
Brazil in colonial times, thanks to its sugar production—with these words:

Every quilombo that appeared on the summit of a wooded ridge consti-
tuted an obscure little epic. Evaluated as a whole, and in historical per-
spective, the guilombos assume the dimension of a great epic.

They did not achieve success in their attempts to transform society,
but they did exhibit the specificate predicate of the epic: the heroic
action through which human beings assert themselves as such, indepen-
dently of success or failure. These rustic black republics manifested the
dream of a social order founded on an equality of siblingship, and are
therefore integral to the revolutionary tradition of the Brazilian people.

Palmares was the most eloquent manifestation of the antislavery dis-
course of Brazilian blacks throughout nearly three centuries of slavery.
The resolution taken at Serra da Barriga to die rather than accept reen-
slavement expresses the essence of the message that the Palmares blacks
send from the depths of their night. After all—to cite the Hegelian
reflection—“The master is master only in virtue of the fact that he pos-
sesses a Slave that recognizes him as such” (Décio Freitas, Palmares: a
guerra dos escravos, 2nd ed. [Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1978], p. 210).

42. The authoritarian discriminations of Brazilian society ultimately pro-
claim the illiterate incapable of thinking, deciding, or choosing, so that
they ought not to be accorded the right to vote. Indeed, we hear, anyone
elected by the illiterate would also be uncultivated, and equally “harmful
to the nation.”

Those who think in this way ignore the fact that the illiterate are pre-
cisely illiterate with respect to reading and writing, not orally, and that
the reading of the world precedes the reading of the word, as we learn
from Freire himself.

Our historical tradition, arising as it does from the slave mode of pro-
duction prevailing in colonial times, molds us to an authoritarian, elitist,
discriminatory society, as I have asserted in several of these notes to
Freire’s book.

In the Brazilian Empire, only “good men” voted—that is, male property
owners. The first republican constitution, of 1891, having excluded the
illiterate (along with beggars, women, and the noncommissioned military)
from voting, dialectically perpetuated an inexperience with democracy,

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 233

and within that, an inexperience with choosing and voting. Women voted
and could be elected to office only from 1933 on.

Only with the 1985 elections did the illiterate win their suffrage. They
might vote if they wished: they were not, however, obliged to do so, as were
all literate citizens of Brazil, native or naturalized, from the age of eighteen.

Beginning with the 1989 elections, the right to vote was extended to
young persons from the age of sixteen up—provided, of course, they knew
how to read and write.

In the presence of this historical tradition of “aristocratic, elitist rancid-
ity,” one readily appreciates the dismay, rejection, and fear prevailing, in
any phase of the electoral process, in a Brazilian election.

43. Luiza Erundina is Mayor of Sao Paulo, and the “Petist” administra-
tion is the government she as a member of the Petist party has formed for
the management of that immense city. The word Petist derives from the
protogram for Partido dos Trabalhadores, Workers Party: PT, pronounced
“pay-tay. ”

The PT is both a new political party, and a novel one in terms of its
orientating ideologies. It maintains a doughty, committed militancy, with
the result that the degree of its intervention and participation in the na-
tional political scene (and not only in that of municipalities where it has
had its candidates elected to the prefecture) waxes by the day.

44. To the extent permitted by the Constitution, the Municipal Educa-
tion Secretariate of S4o Paulo prioritizes primary instruction: eight school
years, maintained in 355 schools. It also conducts a secondary school, and
many (324) nursery schools. It maintains no institution of higher education,
and only five “special education” schools, which are exclusively for the
hearing-impaired and comprise both the primary and secondary levels.

In Brazil, the federal, state, and municipal governments all maintain free
instruction, in accordance with the wherewithal and priorities of each, on
the higher, secondary, and primary levels.

I speak of priorities because there is nothing to prevent (and it actually
occurs) a state of the federation from maintaining primary and secondary
schools (Sao Paulo State is the best example), or a municipality from offer-
ing instruction at all three levels: higher, secondary, and primary. The
federal union itself only very rarely offers instruction below the univer-
sity level.

Let us observe that this official instructional network—regular, and in
various special purpose modalities, supletivo (supplementary)—is further
complemented by private systems, which also offer instruction on the three
levels instituted in the country.

These private establishments are monitored and financed by the various

934 - PAULO FREIRE

government offices for education on all three levels of government, besides
being subject, of course, to the principles, objectives, and finalities im-
posed by the Law of Directives for and Foundations of National Education,
which sets standards for all Brazilian schooling.

45. The authoritarian, centralizing power tradition so familiar to Brazil-
ian society has of course extended itself to all facets of that society. Educa-
tion could scarcely have expected to be an exception.

In 1961 we saw the first law voted by the National Congress for the three
levels of instruction. From 1822 to 1961, all matters concerning education
had been determined by decrees and “law decrees,” with the exception of
two pieces of legislation that instituted, in 1827, the “law courses’ and the
“schools of primary letters” in Brazil. Up until 1961, then, the disciplines
and their curricula, their objectives, their standards, and especially their
content—or their programs, since content was more commonly referred
to up until then—were determined by legally binding regulations of vari-
ous kinds issued by the Minister of Education with the endorsement of
the President of the Republic.

Only with the enactment of the 1961 Law of Directives for and Founda-
tions of National Education did local officials and the instructional institu-
tions themselves receive official authority to engage in determinative
deliberations on instructional matters. Heretofore local discussion had
been permitted only by way of exception and/or solely within the letter of
the law.

This experiment in the democratization of instruction, unprecedented
in extent and depth, was initiated during the democratic administration of
Mayor Luiza Erundina, thanks to the administrative skills, authority, and
competence—professional, pedagogical, and political—of Paulo Freire.

The arduous, difficult task in question, to be performed without the old
authoritarian, interdicting “rancidities,” but also without going to the other
extreme of permissiveness and “spontaneism’—constant concerns of
Freire—was carried out, with enthusiastic concurrence on the part of all
involved, in Paulo's tenure from January 1, 1989, to May 27, 1991, as

unicipal Secretary of Education.

[ Thus, the content of the courses pursued by the students of the Sao

aulo city schools, which have taken with alacrity to the new democratic
experience of self-management, takes its point of departure in community
needs and experience, which latter are thereupon subjected to cognitive
exploration by teachers specializing in the various fields of knowledge, all
working simultaneously.

An interdisciplinary approach to studies, and the choice of themes to be
investigated, as part of the democratization of instruction, have yielded

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 235

excellent results in terms of the acquisition of knowledge in itself scientific
but based on a starting point in the commonsense knowledge that the
children bring with them to school. In fact, the children come to perceive
(and this is basic for their formation) the unity prevailing in the plurality
of things, as well as the importance of a minute interpretation of each of
the various parts of the universe within the totality.

During his term as head of the Sao Paulo Municipal Education Secreta-
riat, through the implementation of an authentically democratic approach
to management, Freire has demonstrated that decentralization is not only
possible, but desirable. A democratic decentralization is found to occasion
the active reinforcement of decisions that need to be taken in function of
the desires and needs of the various communities, and in terms of the
social classes of each, throughout the immense metropolis that is the city
of Sao Paulo.

Delegating his authority to the secretariat’s technological teams, Freire
encouraged the formation of a number of deliberative bodies whose pur-
pose would be to address various matters impinging on the main core of
the act of educating, the act performed by that municipal organ that is
the school.

These bodies are made up of pupils, teachers, directors or principals,
superintendents, counselors, and mothers and fathers, together with all of
the support personnel in the schools—in other words, everyone involved
in the educational process.

46. Freire could have cited a work he had already written, before 1960
(the date of the text at hand), as evidence of his concern for content from
his earliest writings onward.

I refer to the “Theme Three Report” he developed, which was presented
by the Pernambuco Commission, and then included as well in the Second
National Congress of Adult Education, held in Rio de Janiero, July 6-16,
1958.

I recently read a paper in the Mining Symposium on the Thought of
Paulo Freire held in Pocos de Caldas, September 3-6, 1992. I showed
that, by way of that 1958 composition, Freire marked his entry into the
history of Brazilian education. The revolutionary thesis he presented at
that adult-education congress was that important.

That Report of Freire, I am certain, was the seed of all of his other, later
works; but it had a value in itself, as well.

I also declared, there at the beautiful little spa near the hydromines of
Minas Gerais State, that, in my view, when he published Pedagogy of the
Oppressed in 1970—ironically in English in the United States rather than

236 - PAULO FREIRE

in his native Portuguese—he established his place in the universal history
of education.

That book, which became revolutionary the moment it came into the
hands of its first readers, is revolutionary, first, by virtue of the manner in
which its author had come to understand the pedagogical relationship be-
tween human beings and the world. And it is revolutionary in that it opens
up. to those human beings the opportunity they have for liberation for
them all, once they take up their histories for reflection—“detach” their
problems and confront them. Thus, the once seemingly unfeasible be-
comes, through the dream, “untested feasibility’: the dreamers of the
dream—the oppressed—liberate themselves and their oppressors alike
(see note 1, above).

The problem themes to be studied, to be reflected on, and to be con-
quered by each society, will obviously consist in the experiential content
of the lives of those men and women who, in communion, exercise a praxis
of liberation.

Now, with Pedagogy of Hope, Freire expounds and plumbs his favorite
analytical themes more maturely. Objectively, after all, these themes need
to be analyzed as elements of the body of a critical, liberative pedagogy.
And in this new book we are led to understand the author's pedagogical
thinking even better, through the critical seriousness, humanistic objectiv-
ity, and engaged subjectivity which, in all of his works, are always wedded
to a creative innovation. Thus, Freire bequeaths us not only Pedagogy of
Hope, but a pedagogy of hope steeped in “dialogicity,” utopia, and the
human liberation.

But let us return to the Theme Three Report, whose subject, as pro-
posed by the Ministry of Education, which scheduled and sponsored the
event, was: “The Education of Adults and Marginal Populations: Favelas,
Mocambos, “Beehives,” Foreign Enclaves, and So On.” In an altogether
new pedagogical language, most progressive and innovative for the era,
Paulo Freire proposed that the education of adults in the zones of the
mocambos (shacks hidden in the woods, constructed of thatched Brazil
satintail and clay and covered with dried coconut straw) ought to be based
on students awareness of the reality of their everyday lives, and must never
be reduced to simple mechanical, uncommitted literacy. The content, then,
ought to arise out of that experience and that reality.

In the body of his address, Freire spoke of the importance of the pro-
grams of the literacy courses, as content was more commonly called in
those days. I shall transcribe here a part of his “Conclusions and Recom-
mendations,” which constitute a synthesis of his whole discourse, and

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 237

thereby not only provide us with a condensation of his ideas, but indicate
solutions as well.

The programmatic content, then, which ought to be democratically se-
lected by the parties participating in the act of educating for literacy, within
a broader proposal, of educating, was specified as follows:

E. That the program of these courses—always in conformity with local,
regional, and national reality—be developed with the participation of
the educands in some of its aspects, at least in flexible concerns admitting
of adjustment:

1. Hygienic, moral, religious, recreational, and economic aspects of
life in the local area

2. Aspects of regional and national life, especially when they bear on
the development of the country

3. Development and utilization of local democratic leadership
- 4, Creation of new attitudes toward the family, neighbors living close
by, the broader neighborhood, and the municipality. These attitudes

ought to be based on a spirit of solidarity and understanding. [Empha-
sis added. |

As early as the 1950s, then, Freire was building a dialectical relationship
among three elements: literacy education, study content, and the political
act of educating, with this third element “imbedding’” the other two.

47. Bate-papo (chewing the rag, chewing the fat) is a Brazilian colloqui-
alism denoting a noncommittal, amiable, desultory, or even inconsistent
conversation.

48. As a work of basic importance for the rifts in countless societies of
our time, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been subjected to embargos and
interdicts in various parts of the world.

This was the case, for instance, in the 1970s in Portugal, Spain, and
Latin America, where extremely authoritarian government actions bereft
of all popular legitimation proscribed Pedagogy of the Oppressed as “tares ’;
weeds sown amidst good wheat.

I have in my files a dossier on the interdict imposed in Portugal on this
work of Freire’s, where institutions languished under the Salazar yoke up
to the Carnation Revolution in 1974.

These documents, of which I shall now present a summary analysis,
show that, on February 21, 1973, the Office of Information Services, an
organ of the Secretariate of State for Information and Tourism, in its Oficio
(Order) no. 56-DGI/S, “respectfully besought” the Director General of
Security, “for the welfare of the Portuguese nation,” to “be at pains that
the publication” of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, published
by Joao Barrote, be “distrained” or seized, inasmuch as the Information

238 - PAULO FREIRE

Office had ascertained that the work in question was “a book of political
theory, and experiment in the mentalizagao |mentalization, an attempt to
instill a particular mentality, to brainwash] of the people with a view to
inciting a social revolution.”

The document concedes that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is not “neces-
sarily” a work “of a Marxist nature,” but insists that this work of Freire
exhibits “a great deal of [Marxist] influence.”

Portuguese authorities likewise “understood” that, as the edition was a
limited one, and the language of the book “inaccessible,” the danger within
the Portuguese nation itself was not great. They overlooked the fact that
underground copies were being circulated; nor can the language limitation
have been very considerable, as we may gather from the testimony of
Portuguese subjects in the African colonies, whose experiences and suffer-
ings enabled them to understand Freire’s language and proposals alto-
gether adequately.

49. Thiago de Melo, the Amazonian poet who sings the praises of the
Amazon River—“Water'’s Native Country’ —with such beauty and creativ-
ity, lives today by the water’s edge, twenty-four hours from Manaus by boat.

He lives on, he lives with, he lives from, he lives for that rio-mar, that
“ocean of a river,” that he so loves—as he loves the Amazon rain forest,
which is just as full of surprises.

Amidst the flora and fauna, the pororoca (din of the river waters crashing
into the Atlantic), flooded forests, and copper-colored caboclas (mixed-race
Indian-and-white men and women) in that extraordinary, exuberant, and
exotic scenario, Thiago de Melo lives his life, awash in that world of millions
of lives.

Decades ago, in the 1960s, while serving as a Brazilian cultural attaché
in Chile, he hosted a group of Brazilians in his home—almost all of them
exiled from the country next door—and invited Paulo Freire to explain the
approach the latter had been using in his adult-literacy programs in Brazil.
Afterwards, Thiago composed one of his most intensely moving poems.

He had not been able to sleep after the meeting. Freire’s concept of
adult education had been too exciting, too astonishing for him. The next
morning, on that summer's day of 1964, in solidarity with the numberless
folk of his race and kind who were then prevented from reading the word,
he composed his “Cangao para os poemas da alegria” (Ballad for the poems
of gladness). It appears as an appendix in Paulo Freire’s Educacao como
pratica da liberadade (Brazilian edition).

He composed it in order that his glad wonderment at the creation of
the method, mingled with his sorrowing wonderment that Freire could
have been considered subversive, might proclaim the wonderment of hope.

PEDAGOGY OF HOPE - 239

00. Brazilian President Joao Belchior Marques Goulart took power as
head of state on September 7, 1961, after a surprising turn of events had
brought him hurrying back from China to Brasilia, capital of Brazil and
seat of government of the union.

As vice-president-elect, he had had to cut short his official visit to China
in order to be sworn in as president of the Republic, following the unex-
pected resignation of Janio Quadros, a mere seven months after the latter
had taken office amidst great hope and enthusiasm on the part of the
Brazilian people who had elected him.

Goulart, another of our populist rulers, erroneously regarded as a Com-
munist, was under the watchful eye of the military, the dominant Brazilian
class, and the Northern “owners of the world,” throughout his incumbency.

His indecisive measures for a grassroots reform, necessary though they
were for the country—and in the interest of the subordinate strata and
therefore of progressive sectors—left those of the political Left almost as
dissatisfied as those of the Right, who considered that President Goulart
had gone too far in his concessions to “those people.”

Strikes, including by navy personnel and sergeants of the national army;
the emergence of peasant organizations, especially the peasant leagues;
educational and popular cultural movements; attempts at a land reform to
deal with the latiftindios improdutivos, or enormous unproductive land
tracts; social legislation in behalf of farm workers; tactless, inflammatory
speeches by members of his administration, some of them delivered from
the public reviewing stands of the streets; a National Adult Literacy Pro-
gram that responded to the interests of the social strata excluded from
the schools for centuries; the public apology of the agricultural minister,
Carvalho Pinto, which did manage to subdue some of the wrath of the
right—along with other considerations—unleashed the military coup.
Mounted in the name of the subversion (?) of inflation (100 percent a
year then; now 1000 percent!), and corruption (|!!), the coup signaled the
beginning of a strangling of the Brazilian people and nation that went on
from April 1, 1964, to March 15, 1985.

51. For the National Literacy Program, see notes 7, 27, 49, above.

52. This “city” is called Segundo Montes, and is named for one of the
Jesuits murdered in San Salvador a few years ago by the forces of estab-
lished power.

The residents of this locality recounted to us that they themselves had
had to seek refuge in Honduras, for long years, having fled the massacres
perpetrated by the national army against women, children, and men not
all of whom were engaged in the revolutionary struggle. This is how it was
in Perquin, where more than two thousand simple peasants were crammed

2940 - PAULO FREIRE

onto a little piece of ground and murdered, as an example and warning to
all: Desist from the struggle or die. Desist from the struggle to be-moreso,
from the battle for more being.

The survivors had then made their way, in anguish and distress, to the
neighboring country. Now, in the company of gentle, peaceable United
Nations troops—for they had come on a mission of peace—these same
survivors, ten years older, had trudged for days upon end, traversing moun-
tains and valleys, in anxiety and affliction, returning to their country to
rebuild it.

They had returned to their Province—Morazén—not far from where
they had come. But now they abandoned their former, blood-drenched
locality for another point—a place where, between the forests and the
mountain winds, they might build a place of life, and not of death. Thus
arose the town of Segundo Montes.

They plant crops, breed barnyard animals, discuss their social organiza-
tion, sing their songs, provide literacy courses for their adults, and educate
their children. They are women and men who, reading the world with
humanity and justice, are creating a different world, and they keep their
eyes on Segundo Montes, “the Father.”

That Jesuit and five of his companions were roused in the middle of
the night to suffer the agony of knowing they were being lined up to
be “executed.”

As the order had been given to leave no witnesses, the woman who did
the domestic work in the Padres house, like her fifteen-year-old daughter,
found no mercy.

This massacre, an inhuman tactic if there ever was one, had been pre-
meditated by the forces in power as a form of intimidation. After all, the
murder of Archbishop Romeo, shot dead as he celebrated mass in San
Salvador Cathedral, had not sufficed.

The rightist government hoped that, with the massacre of the Jesuits,
all the guerrilla forces of the left would surrender. Instead, they grew
stronger still.

Segundo Montes, native of Spain, martyr of E] Salvador, lives on. He
lives in the Viva! his people shout every few minutes in praise of those
to whom they would do homage. And he lives in their longing, in their
irrepressible desire for the education of which they have such need and
which they love, as they cry out, in a chorus that rings like thunder: “Viva
la educatién popular!”

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