A pioneer in Art Education, Ana Mae Barbosa narrates her experience with the educator and how she was inspired by him

Paulo Freire changed my life just as he changed that of thousands of people here in Brazil, allowing us to understand the social orders that oppress us and helping us to develop the ability to organize actions toward the realization of our ideals.    

Today, I am one of the few people who had the privilege of awakening to the intellectual world through Paulo’s classes, learning notions of grammar to pass an exam to enter the college-level program in elementary education and also discovering myself and my historical circumstances.    

I was 18 years old when I was his student not only in Portuguese, but also in education theory, in an intensive course in 1955. At the same time, I was studying for the law school entrance exam, against the wishes of my grandmother. She was the one who raised me – I was an orphan from a young age – and she was against women attending university. I am from a traditional and conservative family, which had already declined economically when I was born. They had lost their money, but not their attitude and their conservatism.    

In the first class in the Preparation Course for the Selection Process for Teachers of the Fourth Instance, already beginning his research in teaching based on the world of the student, Paulo asked us to write about why we wanted to become teachers. I responded by explaining that I did not want to be a teacher, but it was the only work that my family accepted as dignified for a woman. He did not return the essay to me; he asked me to arrive earlier the next day for us to talk. It was a long conversation, in which he convinced me that education was not repression, but rather a process of problematization, liberation and the raising of awareness.    

From then on, Paulo Freire influenced not only my ideas and my choices, but also my life.    

In the course organized by him and his first wife, Elza Freire, I, as someone who had always hated the classes in geometric drawing, got to know the modernist theories for the teaching of art with Noêmia Varela, one of the professors, and once again I was surprised about the mistaken education that I had received at a high school taught by nuns. Once, one of them tore up a drawing of mine in front of the entire class, because I had not copied exactly what she had drawn on the blackboard.    

Having been successful in the selection process to become a teacher, I taught children how to read and write for two years under Paulo’s orientation and was a trainee at the Escolinha de Arte do Recife [Little Art School of Recife], of which he was president, and then I became a full-time teacher. Noêmia Varela was the director, and she and Paula would often talk by telephone about the projects at the school. Their children were students at the institution and, when he would go there to talk with Noêmia, in that unique way of his, he would also talk with the teachers. That little school still exists and was part of a large movement focused on art education in Brazil begun in 1948. We had 140 little schools in Brazil, one in Paraguay, two in Argentina and one in Portugal.    

I arrived in São Paulo at about the same time as Madalena, his daughter. We began to work together at a little school in that network, which I organized with the help of intellectual and bibliophile José Mindlin. Paulo helped us a lot by sending books and commenting on our work in letters. Madalena and I became good friends. I admire her very much.    

My relationship with the Freire family was so intense that it was not interrupted even by the diaspora precipitated by the military dictatorship, which sent the family’s members to foreign countries and also made me move from Recife to Brasília, and later to São Paulo. I was Paulo’s student; Madalena was my informal student; Ana Amália, my daughter, was a student of Madalena and, later, a teacher of Carolina, Madalena’s daughter, at the elementary school. I consider Madalena, Fátima and Cristina – Paulo’s daughters – my sisters in spirit.    

When I received my advanced degree in teaching at the University of São Paulo, he was on my evaluation panel. My thesis was the book A imagem no ensino da arte [The Image in the Teaching of Art], the first in Brazil to espouse the entrance of the image in general, and art in particular, into the classroom, in order to improve the reading of images and critical thought. The stand I took scandalized half the world of the modern expressionist line. Paulo then reminded me about how, when I was in the third year of law school, I had gone to talk to him about quitting law school because of the male chauvinist attitude of that time, and he had advised me to persist, saying that law developed a hermeneutic ability that I would be able to apply in any area in which I would later work. He pointed out that I was including hermeneutics in the classes of visual art. I never more complained about the time lost studying law.  

Paulo Freire and the Arts

The problem is that whoever researches Paulo Freire in the field of the arts learns that he was a great defender of them in all the institutions in which he worked, but he did not write about art in education. Nevertheless, his actions were a manifesto in favor of the arts – and it should be remembered that he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts of Recife (closed in the 1970s, its structure and collection integrated with that of the Center of Arts and Communication of the Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE).    

Together with Professor Miriam Didier, he and Elza Freire began a project for the teaching of reading and writing through art with children from a public school in Recife (PE) of which Elza was the director. And, with Raquel Crasto, a great educator, they had a school that prioritized art, as it still does today: the Instituto Capibaribe.  

There is a book that connects Paulo Freire to the arts through the concept of dialogue. It is Dialogues in Public Art, by Tom Finkelpearl, published 21 years ago by MIT Press, in which the author honors Paulo Freire with the simple phrase: “This book is dedicated to Paulo Freire (1921–1997), a theorist and practitioner of dialogue.”  

The book contains an interview of the author with Paulo Freire, in which he compares his ideas about the relationship between the teacher and the student with those of various theorists, some from art – Rosalind Krauss, Johanne Lamoureux, Mikhail Bakhtin, bell hooks and Miwon Kwon – who defend art as communication. The author uses the educator’s texts to demonstrate that the relationship of communication between art and the public is also not a one-way street. The student and the public are not mere repositories. The aim of dialogue in Paulo Freire’s epistemology and in the statements by another 25 authors of articles and artists interviewed in the book – such as Mel Chin (one of my favorite artists), Maya Lin, Vito Acconci, Douglas Crimp, Elisabeth Sisco and Krzysztof Wodiczko – is not to convince anyone of something or some idea, it is to develop the capacity for criticism. Without it, no one transforms information into knowledge or establishes relationships between the knowledge of different areas.    

Paulo Freire conceived the education of the oppressed, but was never a populist. In the book by Finkelpearl, he says that to work with communities it was not necessary to see them as owners of the truth and of virtue, but rather to respect their members. The educator also said that the error of the sectarians who work in community programs was not the criticism, negation or the rejection of arrogant academic intellectuals, but rather the disregard of theory, the need for rigor and intellectual seriousness.  

The Conference of the Semana de arte e Ensino

I traveled twice to Geneva, Switzerland, to visit him in his exile. The first time, I went alone and stayed with the Freire family. Fátima helped me to explore the city. The second time, I went with my family, and my children never forgot the nights that we had dinner together enjoying that sort of conversation that one remembers forever. Paulo’s sadness for not being able to return was alleviated by Elza – who managed to find ingredients to make Brazilian foods, even tapioca – and by the cold, which he liked. Once, it was winter and I began to feel cold in the living room. I asked if there was heating. He said that yes, but he kept at least one window open to take advantage of the cold.    

In the year that he returned from exile, in 1980, I invited him to open the Semana de arte e ensino [Art and Teaching Week] at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), a congress that was one of the first movements of redemocratization in the country, perhaps the largest event of art education until today in Brazil. His lecture, which took place in the auditorium of the College of Architecture (FAU), for being the largest at USP, was heard by three thousand art educators. It was necessary to request the help of TV Cultura to film and transmit the event on a screen outside the auditorium, in the place they called the Salão Caramelo.  

His name had not been announced as a lecturer in the preprogram or in the press, to avoid the appearance of using him as an attraction for the event. His first appearance in public had been an apotheosis, heard by everyone who filled the Theater of the Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Tuca) and its environs.  

In the program of the Semana de arte e ensino, handed out to the participants on opening day, I justified the absence of his name as follows:  

All the decisions, including the themes of the debates, were submitted for approval in general meetings open to the public and announced in newspapers.  It was decided who wanted to participate, and who could participate. Just one thing was kept secret: the participation of Paulo Freire as a lecturer. My enormous respect for him and for the art educators made me fear that the announcement of his participation could look like a way of attracting participants to the Semana de Arte e Ensino. He will be talking to the art educators not because he is the greatest Brazilian educator, but because since the old times in Recife he and Elza have always maintained a close relationship and influence in art education. The theme of his lecture is a lemma which, in the ways of the Northeast, I posed to him as a challenge. The day after an intriguing chat at the Escola da Vila I said to him: “You said that the parents learn from the children and the teachers from the students. So, you, who have two art-educator children and an art student (Joaquim), what have you learned from them about art education?” He accepted the challenge of responding to the question for all of us during the week and also accepted that another person should give the title to this challenge. It was Haroldo de Campos who, talking to me about the program, christened his lecture as “O retrato do pai pelos jovens artistas” [The Portrait of the Father by the Young Artists].  

That day, rather dizzy due to an ear infection, he was glad to see, once again, friends and fellow Brazilians such as Noêmia Varela and graphic designer Aloísio Magalhães, and to make new acquaintances, such as art critics Mário Barata, Yan Michalski and Walter Zanini, as well as composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, also invited to talk and to attend his opening lecture. Strangely, the originals of the annals of the Semana de arte e ensino were lost in the phase of their review for publication.

An Educator of the Underdeveloped World, a Driver of Liberation in the Developed World

I witnessed the influence that Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, transformed into theory, had at America, African, English and European universities in general.    

His works are on Internet, you can read and judge their value for yourselves. If you have any doubt about their importance in the world, take a look at Pedagogia da libertação em Paulo Freire, edited by Ana Maria Araújo Freire (Nita), his second wife, who demonstrated to Brazil that Paulo is a key reference in the thinking of great philosophers and educators, such as Henry Giroux, Joachim Schroeder, Joe Kincheloe, Maxine Greene, Shirley Steinberg, Arantxa Ugartetxea, Donaldo Macedo, Joachim Dabisch and Arve Brunvoll. All of them wrote texts for the book published by Nita, who has bravely defended the memory of her husband.  

When, in 1977, I entered the PhD program of the College of Education of Boston University, in the United States – with a letter of introduction from Paulo – a course about The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was being given. I experienced an unimaginable emotional and cognitive thrill upon seeing, as an object of study, the liberating process that had rescued me from the banking models of mental operation. I was never so well treated and listened to at any university as I was there in Boston. Thanks to this very special treatment, I managed to complete all the requirements of the program in one year and I returned six months later to defend the thesis, saving me from having to be separated from my family.    

Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol and Ivan Illich were two great heroes of education at that time. The others were forgotten, but Paulo continues, mainly for the fact that Pedagogia do oprimido is the basis for the two most significant movements in the theory of education today: critical pedagogy and cultural pedagogy, inspired in his concept of raising awareness and in John Dewey’s concept of experience, which are epistemological cousins. Indeed, the first book by Dewey that I read, Meu credo pedagógico [My Pedagogical Creed], was given to me by Paulo when I was still in Recife.    

‍Pedagogia do oprimido was written in a period of intensive educational criticism, around 1968, and was the convincing response for the student protest movement in the developed world. It operated a curious contradiction: the educator of the underdeveloped world, with his theories constructed on the practice of poverty in the third world, acting as a driver for the liberation of the developed world. But contradictions were always the food for Paulo Freire’s critical thought.  

My Most Important Cognitive Adventure

These were the phenomenological bases that underpinned the postgraduate course Arte-educação e ação cultural [Art Education and Cultural Action] that Paulo Freire gave at (ECA/USP) in 1987, at my invitation.    

He was reluctant to accept, but Elza helped me to convince him. The funds that I received from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to pay him were very modest. We had 120 students, from all areas of USP, from law to engineering. Many were just auditing the class, others were special students, but there were many regular masters’ and doctoral candidates, which resulted in a great quantity of works to be read and graded, an activity that I assumed, frequently consulting him. He gave nine classes and I only three, to substitute him when he traveled. It was the most important cognitive adventure in my life and today it is a historic milestone, as it was the only regular course that Paulo Freire gave at USP. The course was recorded in audio and transcribed by Professor Maria Helena Rennó, but was lost at the publishing house of the ECA, another strange occurrence.    

It was necessary for the College of Education to be renovated, with new humanist researchers and a vocation for the social, in order for one of its professors, Moacir Gadotti, a faithful friend of our great teacher, to create the Instituto Paulo Freire (IPF), which honors and exalts his memory. I have heard nothing but praise from the researchers who seek out the IPF, where one of Paulo’s sons, Lute, works.  

My Activity in the São Paulo Secretariat of Education

Soon after I took over as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of USP, I organized a study group about museums at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA/USP). Paulo was one of the people invited to talk and he gave us a valuable piece of advice, which I followed: consult the workers unions to find out what their families understood as art, their cultural habits and how they were constructed, to then plan to extend the museum to the working class. We recorded his lecture, which I left in the archives of the IEA.    

Later, at Paulo’s request, the MAC was able to collaborate with his work at the Secretariat of Education of the Municipality of São Paulo. When he was Secretary of Education of the City Government of São Paulo (for two years), he put the studies of art at the same level of importance as all the other disciplines. This had taken place in Brazil in only two other projects, that of jurist Rui Barbosa, in 1882–1883, which was never fully implemented, and that of Professor Fernando de Azevedo, in the Federal District, in 1927–1930.    

For about one year, I coordinated the study group for the restructuring of the arts curriculum with university professors and teachers from the school system. In the end, Maria Christina de Souza Lima Rizzi – a student I was advising and an art educator at MAC during that time – took over the coordination of this group that Paulo said was the most numerous in the secretariat, as it focused on all the arts, including film making. At the end of the mandate of educator Mario Sergio Cortella, who succeeded him brilliantly as secretary, all the art professors had been updated. For various years after that, the best art teaching in a public education network in Brazil was that of the city of São Paulo.    

Some of us, who worked with Paulo, are gathering memories of that time of the secretariat. We should reactivate our memory in honor of him, who had a very keen recollection.  

My Favorite, Pedagogia do oprimido

To cap off these reminiscences, I should confess that my favorite book continues to be Pedagogia do oprimido. This work is philosophy, sociology, education and, above all, a treatise of epistemology. It is a book born from the struggle undertaken by its author to give to the individuals of all social classes the right to be the subject of their own process of knowledge and to awaken within them the interests, the incisiveness and courage necessary to participate in the process for the transformation of their societies. It is a pedagogy of cultural re + conhecimento and, mainly, the pedagogy of contextualized critical thought.    

The awareness of the practice gave rise to the theory that pervades Pedagogia do oprimido. The concern was to ally the clarity of content with the means that allow students “to say their own words to name the world.” I was a subject of the pedagogy in favor of the oppressed of all social classes, all genders and all origins practiced by Paulo Freire.