Publication attests to the relevance of the studies initiated by Freire and extended to other areas of expression

“I want to say that I am not magical, that this method has underpinnings, and experience has already shown us that it is effective.” This is the beginning of one of the main documents of the first experiment in the en masse teaching of literacy to youths and adults in Brazilian education. In the municipality of Angicos, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, in 1963, Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921–1997) headed up a team of teachers and monitors who had a bold aim in a country submersed in miserable educational indices: to teach the adult population to learn to read and write in around 40 hours and at a low cost per student.  

The method developed by the Pernambucan philosopher, writer and educator taught the reading of the written word – and, thus, the possibility of reading the world – to 300 people, who thereby gained not only the right to vote but also an awareness of their role in the routine world of work. The experience, which began with a door-to-door movement, ended up by inspiring the National Literacy Plan – which stayed merely on the drawing board after the military coup of 1964 – while also causing a lot of commotion in the towns and countryside of the state’s arid backlands.

This celebrated undertaking, today known and revered worldwide, only became possible due to a combination of factors in a determined context. And outlining this scenario is crucial in order to begin to understand the studies traced out by Paulo Freire. Leaving a “library culture,” according to his own description, to “combat illiteracy,” a concrete result, Paulo moved among concepts such as plurality, transcendence, dialogue, humility, work and love, among many others, seeking to “grow and change” with the human. “A is related to B because both share the same feeling in search of something. Humility consists in not hypertrophying anything in this search.”  

Thus, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of a man who traveled to more than 30 countries, who coordinated literacy projects far from his birth land – though always steeped in the “northeasterness” of his native region – who wrote more than three dozen works and was translated into 20 languages is a highly demanding and inexhaustible task. Every year, new developments concerning Paulo Freire’s thoughts and method arrive from new corners of the world, even though, on the other hand, there is a great lack of his philosophy in our classrooms.  

Ontologically creative, Paulo Freire requested, in keeping with his definition of the human, to never be followed, but rather reinvented. Therefore, seeking to attest to the currentness and relevance of the fields of studies he began – would he have valued this undertaking? – we invited 10 representatives from different areas of knowledge and expression to tell, in this publication, how they have related their work to the knowledge acquired from Paulo Freire, in a practice that always leads to freedom, marking the world and being marked by it.  

Beyond this publication, which also features the reverberations of the educator in other countries, the Ocupação Paulo Freire, produced entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic, presents a series of contents online. Visit itaucultural.org.br/ocupacao.  

‍Itaú Cultural