Paulo Freireï¿½s 8th Death Anniversary: The Legend of Participatory Development

2 May 2005

Paulo Freireï¿½s 8^th Death Anniversary

The Legend of Participatory Development

By: Shazzad Khan

Introduction:

Over the last 30 years, the definitions of ï¿½developmentï¿½ and ï¿½participationï¿½ have changed radically. In the 1960s ï¿½developmentï¿½ was viewed primarily as a process of industrialisation and economic expansion within the ï¿½Third Worldï¿½. Rural development was understood only in relation to agricultural development and was largely perceived as an interim step on the way to urban industrialisation.

In the rural context, the objective of initial development efforts was to ï¿½moderniseï¿½ the values of the peasants and to make them more oriented to urbanisation and industrialisation. Most unfortunately, rural poor were viewed as passive receivers of development inputs. The solution to the problem of underdevelopment, therefore, seemed simply to be providing them with the right measures and prescriptions as considered suitable by the development planners. But these one-way development efforts which were in other words ï¿½top-downï¿½ did not really work. This was because of the fact that the roles and needs of the people who really needed the development were ignored and as such this top-down development efforts did not have any effect on the poor to be self-reliant. Virtually, the poor silently considered these external development initiatives as foreign bodies and with unwillingness, gradually became dependent on and enchained by them.

Fortunately, the reasons for such failures could be recognised and the importance of involving people in all aspects of development decision-making was also widely acknowledged. Development was redefined as a process of ï¿½educationï¿½ and ï¿½empowermentï¿½ which devotes to strengthen and support the indigenous skills and knowledge of rural people by supplementing or reinforcing the existing wisdoms with the scientific knowledge, based on sharing of learning. Development was also seen as a process which involves increased access to resources (eg land, capital, credit, institutions, knowledge and information) by rural people.

The invaluable contribution to such a shift from top-down to bottom-up approach was made among others by one of the renowned political pedagogues named Paulo Freire of Brazil. In the 1960s and 1970s, he initiated debates about the meaning of ï¿½participationï¿½ with a growing body of theory and practice about grassroots development. Freire devised radical learning programmes with people living on the margins of the society. He introduced a novel method of radical and liberal education to encourage poor people to think critically about the reasons for their under-development, oppression, exploitation and exclusion. Freire put forward the notion of critical learning as a process that could lead to social transformation.

Freireï¿½s objections to a top-down mode of learning in which marginalised and poor people are treated as passive recipients of knowledge were reflected in a move among development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to devise methods of working with poor communities, which would actively involve them in identifying and solving their own problems. Rural peopleï¿½s resilience and ability to survive in harsh climatic, social and economic conditions was argued as a case to reassess and respect local knowledge and expertise. Also it was emphasised that the people should be the sole authority to decide what kind of initiatives they really need for their development and well-being. This implicit logic was based on the fact that both societies and individuals have innate biological, psychological and sociological capacities which can be utilised by themselves to analyse their own reality and needs and to take necessary measures for socio-economic development. For doing this the development practitioners definitely have roles to play, but not as deciders, rather as facilitators ï¿½ to put them through the process of ï¿½conscientisationï¿½. Letï¿½s see how Paulo Freire developed his theory and practice for giving a new dimension to the realm of education and development.

Life and Work of Freire:

Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil on September 19, 1921. He died on May 2, 1997 of heart attack. Freireï¿½s catholic family was not very rich with his father doing the job of a petty officer in the military service. Although not well-off, his father had great interest in his childrenï¿½s education, which practically paved the way for Freire to go for schooling.

Due to financial problems caused by the economic depression in 1929 and onwards, Freireï¿½s family was forced to leave Recife, settling in nearby Jaboatao where Paulo spent part of his childhood and adolescence. In Jaboatao, he began to be aware of the world around him and that all was not well, since many of his friends lived in extreme poverty. He described himself as a ï¿½connective boyï¿½ because, among his day to day companions, were some who ate less and some who hardly ever ate. He said, ï¿½In Jaboatao, when I was ten, I began to think that there were a lot of things in the world that were not going well.ï¿½ During this time Freire found himself among the ï¿½wretched of the earthï¿½. This gnawing pang of hunger had profound influence on his young life, and just at that time he made a vow to dedicate his life for the struggle against poverty. Perhaps this was the beginning for Freire to perceive that ï¿½reality of life has some link with politicsï¿½. To share his feeling he mentioned that this firsthand struggle brought forth a fundamental change in his life and thus the horizon of his world expanded further.

Freire returned to Recife to attend high school a couple of years later. His mother managed to convince the director of the Oswaldo Cruz private high school to accept Paulo as a scholarship student. Later, he returned to the school as a teacher of Portuguese. As a student Freire was full of potential. All aspects of life he learnt to view critically. Nothing was ï¿½as simple as anythingï¿½ to him. Many a time he attempted to uncover the problems of life, and for this his parents had to receive the ironic comment from his teacher that he had ï¿½mild mental retardationï¿½. But this evaluation was later proved to be starkly immaterial as he smoothly grew up as a pleader, a profession he never liked for himself though. In fact from a very early age he already had developed a great passion in social reform and the rights of the minorities. As a result this indomitable desire led him to brush aside law as a career and to become an educationist.

He began his education in a law school at the University of Recife in 1943. In 1944 he married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira, a primary school teacher. He began to practice law but stoped before defending his first client, a young dentist. Freire observed, ï¿½I said to Elza: ï¿½You know what, Iï¿½m not going to be a lawyer.ï¿½ Elza said, ï¿½I was hoping for that. Youï¿½re an educator.ï¿½

ï¿½From the time I got married I began to be interested in the problems of education in a systematic way,ï¿½ said Freire. From 1940 to 1950, he spent much of his free time reading widely, cataloguing and taking voluminous notes, to understand the problems of life and their links with education.

Freire vehemently maintained that his familiarity with Marxism never distanced him from Christ: ï¿½I never understood how to reconcile fellowship with Christ with the exploitation of other human beings, or to reconcile a love for Christ with racial, gender and class discrimination. By the same token, I could never reconcile the Leftï¿½s liberating discourse with the Leftï¿½s discriminatory practice along the lines of race, gender, and class. What a shocking contradiction: to be, at the same time, a leftist and a racist.ï¿½

In 1946, he takes over as Director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture of SESI (the Social Service of Industry), a government agency decreed by then President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, to use funds from a national confederation of factory owners to create programmes for the betterment of the standard of living of their workers.

In his book Pedagogy of Hope, Freire detailed the significance of his ten years at SESI, an experience which provided the experiential basis for his doctoral dissertation (1959) and his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, a work he finished and published in the early years of his Chilean exile (1965): ï¿½One of our tasks as progressive educators, today and yesterday, is to use the past that influences the present. The past was not only a time of authoritarianism and imposed silence, but also a time that generated a culture of resistance as an answer to the violence of power.ï¿½

He further observed, ï¿½The Brazilian present has been enveloped by these colonial legacies: silence and the resistance to it ï¿½ the search for a voice ï¿½ and the rebelliousness that must become more critically revolutionary. This was the theme of my academic thesis, ï¿½Education and Present-Day Brazil,ï¿½ which I defended in 1959 at the University of Recife. I incorporated parts of this thesis in my first book. I combined my experiences at SESI with critical reflection and extensive reading from a foundational biography.ï¿½

In 1957, Freire was appointed Director of SESIï¿½s Pernambuco Regional Chapterï¿½s Division of Research and Planning and began to travel widely throughout the Northeast as a consultant to other SESI programmes. He was also one of the founders of the Capibaribe Institute in Recife which remains a (private) school well-known for its commitment to a high-level scientific, ethical and moral education and democratic stance. He also sat on Recifeï¿½s Educational Consulting Board. In 1959, his thesis was accepted and he was appointed Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education at the School of Fine Arts. In 1961, he was made Director of the Division of Culture and Recreation of the City of Recifeï¿½s Department of Archives and Culture. In 1963, he became one of fifteen ï¿½Pioneer Council Membersï¿½ chosen by Governor Miguel Arraes to preside over matters of education and culture in the state of Pernambuco.

Freireï¿½s reputation as a progressive educator was enhanced when he was presented as the chief writer and creator of the ideas contained in Theme III of the Pernambuco Regional Commissionï¿½s report to the Second National Conference on Adult Education, in Rio de Janeiro in 1958. Entitled the ï¿½Education of Adults and Marginal Populations: the Mocambos Problem,ï¿½ the paper proposed that adult education in the Pernambuco Mocambos had to have its foundation in the consciousness of the day-to-day situations lived by the learners; educational work towards democracy would only be achieved if the literacy process was not about or for man, but with man. This attitude heralded that a more progressive segment of Brazilian society was ready to break with the archaic, authoritarian, discriminatory, elitist traditions which had for centuries enslaved the Brazilian poor.

Apart from his academic and institutional life, Freire participated in movements for popular education in the early 1960s. The most important of these were the Movement for Popular Culture (MCP) in Recife, the Cultural Extension Service (SEC) at the University of Recife (now the Federal University of Pernambuco: UFPE) and the ï¿½Bare Feet Can Also Learn to Readï¿½ campaign in the neighbouring state of Rio Grande do Norte where Freire got his first chance to try out his method with three hundred sugarcane sharecroppers in the interior village of Angicos in 1963. When that experiment proved successful, he was invited by President Joao Belchior Goulart to implement a national literacy campaign. The programme was intended to make five million adults literate and politically progressive within the first year. According to the national law at the time, adults could only vote if they were functionally literate to some degree. For years this limiting of the Brazilian electoral college had worked in favour of the hegemonic oligarchy. Now the landowners were threatened by the possibility that the peasants would organise into leagues, become literate and swell the ranks of the voters. The American backed coup of March 31, 1964 deposed the popular Goulart government and imposed military rule which lasted for over twenty years. Freire was arrested twice and imprisoned in Olinda and Recife for over two months before receiving political asylum in the Bolivian embassy in Rio and proceeding to La Paz where he found the altitude and uncertain politics contrary to his health and left for Santiago, Chile within a month.

In almost sixteen years of exile, Freire established residence in only three places: Santiago (1964-69) where he worked as an adult educator for two organisations having to do with agricultural improvement and land reform, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1969-70) where he taught for ten months at Harvard and Geneva, Switzerland (1970-79) where he worked and travelled under the auspices of the World Council of Churches as a kind of roving ambassador of literacy to the Third World. In this capacity, he travelled the world, dialoguing and lecturing about his ideas and experiences and taking part in seminars, conferences, congresses and advising revolutionary governments in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Allied with his endeavour for propagating his concepts and philosophies he started putting down his ideas and thoughts on peopleï¿½s liberation through education, which eventually developed into a classical work in the domain of education. The work is ï¿½one and uniqueï¿½ titled ï¿½Pedagogy of the Oppressedï¿½ published in 1970. It is in this book he asserted the belief that the oppressed and the ordinary people have infinite physical and intellectual potential and capacity which, if bloomed, can contribute to the development of the society as well as of themselves.

Freire returned to Brazil in 1980 with the dream of ï¿½relearning itï¿½ after an absence of sixteen years. After cutting through lots of ï¿½red tapesï¿½ and political diffidence, he was offered professorial assignments at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC) and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He also actively involved in politics with Workersï¿½ Party of Brazil. When the Workersï¿½ Party won the municipal elections in Sao Paulo in 1988, a natural choice for the Secretary of Education was Paulo Freire. It may be mentioned here that this Workersï¿½ Party is now in power in Brazil led by Lula da Silva.

His appointment as Secretary of Education of the City of Sao Paulo in January 1989 created a unique opportunity for him to implement his ideas in his own country. As a member of the party since 1979, and President of the Workersï¿½ Party sponsored Fundacao Wilson Pinheiro (a sort of workerï¿½s university) and Secretary of Education, Paulo Freire took charge of 654 schools with 700,000 students, and also engaged in adult education and literacy training in the City of Sao Paulo. The reverberations of his policy work are still felt in Sao Paulo due to the implementation of many of the innovations of his administration of curriculum, teacher training, school governance and literacy training which linked social movements with the state.

Freire in Bangladesh Context:

Freireï¿½s education model revolves around certain basic principles. These include subject to subject relation among human beings, democratisation of culture for all, problem solving oriented learning, reading the word for reading the world, humanisation for upholding humanity, dialogical praxis and contextualisation of educational issues.

It goes without saying that Freirean education model has immense potential for spreading non-formal (also formal) education in Bangladesh. Freire viewed literacy and continuing education as a means for democratisation of culture among the rural and urban non-literate people. This undoubtedly has profound implications for sustainable democracy in Bangladesh against the backdrop that over 70 million people are non-literate (not illiterate) and the government is determined to eradicate illiteracy through popular education movement. If the popular education model of Paulo Freire is adopted and adapted in the literacy campaign, the future literate people of the country will develop capacity for critical thought to work democratically within popular organisations. More importantly, practice of three ethical values in the education arena, viz. freedom and human rights, critical dialogue (not polemics), and respect for creativity can make up a democratic culture in the organisations that are promoting and want to promote non-formal participatory education in Bangladesh. In this regard, both government and NGOs can do in-depth study on Paulo Freireï¿½s life and work, and contextualise his education model for Bangladesh situation. For experience sharing they can even take support from those implementing Freireï¿½s education theories and model for their literacy and sustainable development programme. Organisations having adopted Freirean approach in Bangladesh so far are: BRAC, FIVDB, Proshika, ActionAidï¿½s REFLECT, CARE, etc.

Concluding Remarks:

As a political pedagogue, Paulo Freire was the main proponent of liberation theory. He basically took humanistic and liberating approach to the questions of development. The underlying assumption was that the members of the underdeveloped societies are oppressed by the power-holders of their own societies, who control the relevant economic resources such as agriculture, land, industry, capital, service and wealth. Freire argued that the main remedy for overcoming this oppression lies in the education of the oppressed to be aware of their condition and position through critical learning and taking pragmatic actions. His theoretical focus tends to be on the role of education in the liberation and development process. ï¿½Indeed, for Freire, liberation is development, and for those espousing the liberation approach, development is more a question of justice rather than wealthï¿½ (Curle, 1973).

Although Freire is no more with us he is still an inspiration to the practitioners and academics world-wide, not only those involved in literacy, but also those working with wider education, community work, development work, cultural movement and even with politics. He is adored because all through his life he lived with those realities existing with the oppressed class. He preached for a ï¿½subject to subject relationshipï¿½ so that the oppressed could break the culture of silence renouncing the oppressorsï¿½ worldview and establish their own worldview from their own perceptive, for a democratic culture for all people living free. He inspired to generate firm hope which is indispensable for acquiring democratic culture, liberating education and for social change: ï¿½Without hope there is little we can do. Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tantamount to denying that struggle one of its mainstays.ï¿½

Freire talked about feeling of love, hope and attachment for liberation and humanisation. He pointed out that love is instrumental in humanising the self and humanising the world which could be achieved through a participatory, modest and empowering learning process. This articulation of Freire was, is and will continue to be a source of inspiration to human being across the world.

Until his death, apart from his PhD, he received 31 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards and prizes for his immense contribution to education and participatory development, but having such mammoth honour Paulo Freire remained to the end a man of great humility. He will ever remain as a long lasting voice of commitment, love, hope and aspiration for the oppressed and deprived people around the globe.

[The author is a development worker now working with ITDG-Bangladesh;

Email: [email protected]]