Gottfried Hausmann, Paulo Freire, and UNESCO: The radical humanists in the field of comparative education

• In Event: The 70th anniversary of the International Review of Education: Reflecting on the history of comparative education and ‘development’ (Part 1)

Proposal

This paper will revive the memory of Gottfried Hausmann (1906-1994) and Paulo Freire (1921-1997), two radical humanists with close ties to UNESCO. Hausmann was the first Professor of Comparative Education at the University of Hamburg and a close friend of the UNESCO Institute for Education (now UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL)). After his retirement in 1974, he continued to be an adviser of the UIL and served as editor of the UNESCO-associated International Review of Education (IRE). Hausmann was a true internationalist and unconventional thinker. He also had good connections to other progressive educationists such as Paulo Freire. In 1992, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the institute, they met in Hamburg for a panel discussion held at the University of Hamburg, featuring Paulo Freire, Gottfried Hausmann and Bogdan Suchodolski (who died shortly after), three thinkers who represented the humanist “first generation of lifelong learning” (Rubenson, 1999).
The proposed article will engage with Hausmann’s and Freire’s approaches to education, their internationalism and what the authors will define as “radical humanism”. Both Freire and Hausmann were unconventional and progressive educators. Freire is known for his critical pedagogy approach that assigns great agency to the learner and challenges structures of power. While Freire was not a comparativist per se, he had a notable influence on some scholars in the field of comparative education (Elfert, 2023). Hausmann's scholarly focus is essentially to be found in the field of humanistic pedagogy and humanistic psychology (especially holistic and gestalt psychology of the Leipzig School) and in the field of comparative education.
While both were controversial thinkers, whose approach contrasted with the “empirical camp” in comparative education, both were highly appreciated in UNESCO circles. The paper will draw on articles authored by Hausmann, Freire and other „radical humanists“ in the IRE and elsewhere, including a body of historical literature that is not very well known, such as resources collected by one of the authors, Gabriele Rabkin, from her time as Hausmann’s doctoral student and close collaborator.
The paper will further shed light on the connections between UNESCO and Paulo Freire. Since he collaborated with the organization as a consultant for a literacy project in Chile in the 1960s, Freire consistently served as a member of high-level literacy committees and followed invitations to attend UNESCO conferences and events. Freire’s ideas have been very influential in the organization and were reflected, for example, in UNESCO’s first flagship report on lifelong learning, Learning to be (aka the Faure report), published in 1972.
The paper is timely as the humanist perspective is on the decline (Elfert, 2023), although it constituted a big part of UNESCO’s legitimacy. We will argue that the radical humanists represented the antithesis of the “ideal 21st century learner” of today, who “is, at its core, devoid of a political vision of the world or an appreciation of the political, material, and economic determinants of social and global problems” (Yliniva, Brunila, & Bryan, 2024).

Author

• Maren Elfert, King's College London