Community Learning Development Resource 200 – 10
UNDERSTANDING LEARNING- PAULO FREIRE
SUMMARY
The ideas of Paulo Freire have shaped the holistic nature of community learning and capacity building.
Paulo Freire: Brazilian Educator (1921 to 1997).
His early life experiences from age 12, shaped his concerns for the poor and his particular educational viewpoint. He stated that poverty and hunger had severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor.
“I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t a lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge”
Improvements in his family life and prospects enabled Freire to study and gain a degree in Law. He never actually practiced Law, becoming a secondary school teacher.
By 1946, promoted to a local government position of some responsibility, and working primarily among the illiterate poor, he began to explore unorthodox ideas, driven by the notion of liberating the poor – who needed in Brazil to be literate to vote.
In 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country. in 1964 he was imprisoned as a traitor following a military coup, and was exiled. Working in Chile he published his first book ‘’Education as the Practice of Freedom’’ followed by his most famous book ‘’Pedagogy of the Oppressed’’, which was widely received abroad (but not in Brazil until 1974)
Freire worked for institutions and international organisations in various parts of the world, becoming much respected. In 1979 he returned to Brazil after regime changes, becoming in 1988 Education Secretary for Sao Paulo, remaining there until his death in 1997.
Paulo Freire’s ideas about education and learning have contributed to our concept of Community Learning – holistic learning from experience, interaction, personal development and building individual capacity, being learner-centred and learner empowerment.
Paulo Freire is iconic for many educators – but equally dismissed by others as encouraging people power and political action – not educating people to conform in society! Clearly Community Learning seeks to build individual and collective capacity and seeks to be empowering (with mutual respect and responsibility). This may be contrary to a more traditional education pedagogy (Beliefs/ values/culture/methods) that seeks to educate people to fit in with society and not seek change!
In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Freire attacked this ‘Jug and Mug’ methodology. In 1970 he noted that “it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power”.
This basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from the belief in the empty vessel waiting to be filled in an educative process. In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction”.
Freire updated ideas of empowerment and social change coming through learning and in practical terms demonstrated their validity. Community Learning is about enabling and encouraging people to be able to choose to take greater control of their lives, their destiny and the quality of their lives. These are capacity building and empowering changes.- in tune with Freire’s philosophy.