Before the theories, before the sophisticated, even elegant, arguments, was the lived experience of Freire and the thousands of north-eastern Brazilian peasants who were part of the transformative literacy movement based on the creation of cultural circles, circles of dialogue. No one had previously had the imagination to bring these thinkers together before.īut to my mind what makes Pedagogy so powerful is that the theoretical scaffolding which Freire created grew from his practice. The stories that Freire told brought together classic socialist thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Lukacs with the existentialist thinking of Sartre and de Beauvoir, with the phenomenology of Husserl, the humanistic psychology of Fromm, the theological ideas of Niebuhr, the Global South revolutionary thinkers such as Fanon and Debray with the thoughts of peasants from north-eastern Brazil. It was an intellectual tour de force about adult education and literacy, a field of educational discourse that was marginal and under-theorised. For Marjorie and myself and the many others working in education in support of Mwalimu Julius K Nyerere’s vision of African socialism, Freire’s book was the first piece of writing that provided us with a theoretical underpinning to what we were trying to do. And the reading of Pedagogy was like being immersed in an intellectual north-eastern Brazilian tropical storm. I am not sure how I got my copy, but I did. It is the best book that I have ever seen on the radical potential of literacy and adult education!”
She held up a red-covered book, a Penguin edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and said, “You have to read this. I had stopped by to drop something off at the home of Marjorie Mbilinyi, an Education Professor at the University. I was working at the Institute of Adult Education at the University of Dar es Salaam at the time. The ideas are as relevant to our battle for justice over demagoguery today as 50 years ago. If you have not yet had a chance to read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, do so now. With a new introduction by Donald Macedo and an afterword by Ira Shor. Bloomsbury Academic, New York and London, 2018, 232 pp. This review of the 50th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been a wonderful opportunity to re-enter the world of Paulo’s thinking and living.
His research approach which he called thematic investigation was one of the influences in our original coining of the concept of participatory research in the 1970s.
Freire’s writings have had a deep influence on both Rajesh Tandon and myself.
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