Brazilian educator, philosopher of education, and the central figure of 20th-century critical pedagogy. Born in Recife into a middle-class family driven into poverty by the 1929 crash, Freire trained in law, turned to adult literacy work with the peasants and urban poor of the Brazilian Northeast, and by the early 1960s had developed a method of teaching literacy that could move a class of non-reading adults to functional reading in roughly forty hours — an achievement with obvious political implications in a country where literacy was a voting requirement. After the 1964 military coup he was arrested, briefly imprisoned, and exiled; he spent fifteen years abroad (Bolivia, Chile, Harvard, Geneva with the World Council of Churches) before returning to Brazil in 1980.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968, English 1970) is the central text — one of the most translated and assigned books of 20th-century social thought. Its argument turns on a contrast. Conventional schooling operates on what Freire calls the "banking model": the teacher deposits information into students who are positioned as passive receptacles; the relationship reproduces the social relations of domination and trains both parties for them. A liberating pedagogy is instead dialogical and problem-posing: teacher and student become co-investigators of a shared reality, and the act of learning to read the word becomes inseparable from learning to read the world — conscientização, the awakening of critical consciousness, is the proper end of education.
Freire's influence runs through liberation theology (the movement and Freire grew up in the same Latin American Catholic-left milieu and cross-fertilized throughout the 1970s), through bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress (1994), through the entire field of critical pedagogy in North America (Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Ira Shor), through community organizing traditions worldwide, and through education reform movements in newly independent African and Asian states. His later books — Pedagogy of Hope (1992), Pedagogy of Freedom (1996) — revisit and complicate the arguments of his youth.