Footnotes to Freire for Critical Pedagogy and Liberating Education: Local Experience and Global Legacy

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

Abstract

Freire’s work as a critical educator is the legendary basis for the growth worldwide of Freire Studies and the self-cultivation of a critical attitude of the oppressed and ‘those who suffer with them and fight at their side’, as the dedication that graces The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) makes clear. In this paper I develop an approach to understanding Freire from the analysis of his footnotes in this magisterial work to show the breadth of his scholarship, its Marxist grounding, local influences in liberation theology and the wide range of sources in the existing critical literature of the time. In this analysis I focus on one footnote that occurs in Chapter Three in which Freire refers a conversation that Andre Malraux has with Mao-Tse-Tung which is recounted in his Anti-Memoirs, where Mao is reported as saying: ‘You know I’ve proclaimed for a long time: we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly.’ Freire comments: ‘This affirmation contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education, which cannot be elaborated according to what the educator thinks best for the students’, (Fn, 7: 93). I use this footnote as a means of elucidating Freirean dialogical theory, contextualizing it in the complete ecology of footnotes to reveal the universality and global legacy of Freire’s thinking that takes place from the birth of his thought in Recife, Brazil only to transcend the local to become the working basis for critical pedagogy globally.

Author

• Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University