Freire: Critique and Utopia

• In Event: Education, Emancipation, and Political Struggle: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Paulo Freire

Abstract

This paper situates Freire’s iconic figure, from the 60s until his death in his search for an emancipatory education of quality for the people. Among his most important contributions is his concept of generative themes in the context of popular education and popular culture. His voice still resonates loud and clear, his silences are inviting and challenging for critical theory and transformative praxis. This paper offers an analysis of Paulo Freire’s most important ideas in the social context that gave rise to and nourished his first experiments in Brazil and Latin America. The first part will speak about new voices lifted at a time of tremendous social turbulence and contradiction in the 1960s and 1970s, among which Freire’s voice resonated with peculiar intensity. After analyzing the social context and some of the major theories and sources of thought and the lineage of ideas that impacted the epoch, I will deal with some of Freire’s silences. These silences are incomplete theories of startling originality, insightful and lasting suggestions underdeveloped, and some of the originality of a brilliant thinker of the 20th century, seeking the zenith of his own production. For the most part, this is the result of Freire’s meta-theoretical approach to questions of praxis and pedagogy; a stimulatingly lucid approach but one which occasionally requires a more exhaustive and refined theoretical analysis or, better yet, empirical research based on investigation and action. To confront and overcome Freire’s silences requires what Freire himself suggested numerous times, that they be reinvented rather than repeated. Freire was not only a sensei to whom we have a debt that it is impossible to repay. He was a pilgrim of hope in the struggle for freedom and emancipation.

Author

• Carlos Alberto Torres, University of California - Los Angeles