The Importance of Paulo Freire in the Act of Reading

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

In 1981, when Paulo Freire presented his paper The Importance of the Act of Reading as the opening keynote speech at the Brazilian Congress on Reading, the act of reading was primarily considered a mechanical and utilitarian skill. At that historical moment, Freire’s work was a pathbreaking approach within the field of literacy and reading. It was a historical context in which the dominant methods of reading considered the subject strictly as sets of skills and abilities that needed to be taught by the teacher and learned by the students. At this time in history, literacy and reading were based solely on decoding processes where children just had to learn first isolated letters, then the names and sounds of the letters, followed by how to use the letters (i.e. “putting them together”) in order to decodify words. It was an excessively fragmented process in which the teacher provided the information and dictated the children to repeat it back. It was the classic process of the banking education which provoked many children to fail, as the reading process was disconnected from the experiences and culture of working class and marginalized children who crowded elementary public schools in Latin America.
The majority of retained children were from low socio-economic status, working-class families, and historically marginalized groups. As a result, retention levels soared, and children ended up abandoning school. By the time Paulo presented his work on reading in Brazil, I was starting my first year of teaching in elementary school, and the preparation I had received in my teacher education program had nothing to do with the concept of connecting children’s reading comprehension with the experiences they had had in the world. I was never taught that reading was a political act.
Adults who were not able to read in Brazil when Freire constructed his reading approach, also were not allowed to exercise their right to vote. For this reason, when Freire taught the peasants to read, they also became able to vote. Their votes were critical in democratically changing the government that exclusively served the rich. It happened because the campesinos learned to read and Freire set up the dialogical context that awakened them to the necessity of empowering themselves to reach new levels of conscientization in order to remake themselves. They were able to break the culture of silence that had been imposed on them. Freire connected reading to the conscientization process, in which campesinos became more, as Freire used to mention the process of becoming complete, more human. When the peasants began to read their world through the word, they understood the subtle forms that the group in power used to oppress them, denying them the possibility to become more, and the role that the government played in this oppressive dynamic. Freire’s work must be considered anew as a fundamental part of teacher education programs, particularly in reading methods classes, to push back against the mechanical and instrumentalist approaches.

Author

• Luis Huerta-Charles, New Mexico State University