In the Spirit of Freire

• In Event: Reading Critical Pedagogies: Reading Paulo Freire

Abstract

I am so glad that in this piece Freire focused on his childhood, youth, and young adulthood. In so doing he inspired me to read more deeply into my own world and the texts written within me. I offer deep appreciation to Paulo Freire for emphasizing the non-human dimensions of his reading of the world in which he grew up. With nuance and vibrancy Freire sketched for readers invoked in me greater capacity to read similar dimensions of my places of growing: images of homes, their nooks and crannies [in which I played in solitary as a child and reading my world as rationalist in boy’s clothing, as Freire adroitly says of himself on page 7]; commentary on places he learned to walk, talk, and socialize [some of the most profound and taken-for-granted learnings for all of us]; early encounters with written words, lights, colors, and gates [metaphorically as passages, too], encounters with trees, other plants, birds and their songs, and animals [all akin to reading my life as an only child growing up on a farm]; ghosts [I think of loving ancestors, unborn babies, and Chief Seattle’s (1855) warning of hauntings of children massacred by White oppressors]. Therein Freire came to know the oppressed, marginalized, hungry, illiterate, and I thought of how I came to know those realities.
So, what I have been calling the spirit of Freire and his work is a spirit of the best of humanity, never finalized, always in the making, and accessible in his roots [for instance in G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Buber, liberation theologists such as Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru or Leonardo Boff of Brazil (see Lake & Kress, 2013)]. Perhaps, this hopeful human spirit streams back to revolutionary religious leaders, such as Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tse, Mohmmed, and many more, including persons who are no longer known known but their influence prevails. They share certain common lines of thought and practice, praxis, that should always be emerging, being re-written, as has been done by authors in this volume. They read, re-read worlds, words. and living texts that grow from multiple perspectives and pedagogies such as those developed by Joe Kincheloe (2008) and others. I feel fortunate to have shared a spirit of humanity from Freire (e.g., 1970;1998), which I believe is a special spirit of humanity – a voice of growth, dialogue, justice, peace, and radical love to which all should aspire. Our world of conquest and oppression desperately needs the spirit many have shared with Paulo Freire. That spirit should be nourished so that it flourishes for current and future generations, especially empowered by Freire’s (1997, p. 101-107) heartfelt and steadfast sense of faith and hope in humanity.

Author

• William (Bill) H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago