“Paulo Freire did not study at Harvard. Harvard studies Paulo Freire!” remembered Victor Arruda ’25, who is from Freire’s hometown in the outskirts of Recife, Brazil. “Coming from Pernambuco, I have sort of always known Freire; his name is all over: streets, schools, buildings,” said Arruda. Victor added that he would like American students to know Freire’s work which remains revolutionary until this day.
As a Brazilian critical educator and philosopher, Freire published the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968, which stood as a fundamental text for critical pedagogy and advocated for dialogical teaching instead of a “banking model of education,” promoting education as a form of liberation. This work inspired a Harvard College course by the same name, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” co-taught by David Joselit and artist, writer, and filmmaker Nicolás Guagnini.
As a political educator, Guagnini hopes to have an experiential and practical application of Freire’s theory at the end of the semester, stating “not at all because I’m anti-theory, but because the matter of praxis is important for Marxism and for Freire himself.”
“In terms of Harvard, […] with all this talk about how Harvard students are leaders of the future, ok, what leadership? For what future? It would interest me to see Freire there.” Most importantly, the Freirean philosophy that “Education doesn’t change the world; education changes people; people change the world” is present in Guagnini’s expectations. “I hope my own role as an oppressor can be clarified after this. I teach to learn,” he said.
Concluding his consideration about his teachings on Freire, Guagnini asserts “I have more hopes [with the class “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”] of transforming myself than transforming Harvard.”
The transformative potential of Freire’s work was recognized early by the military dictatorship. In 1970 Brazil, only the literate had the right to vote. Just after the coup d’etat, Freire’s work on literacy and political consciousness of workers was considered ‘subversive’ by the elites. After being imprisoned and spending part of his exile in countries in Latin America, Freire escaped the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s by becoming a visiting professor at Harvard University. He left the campus after one year, but not without influencing American education and educators with his politicizing pedagogy.
Freire conquered the hearts and minds of North American educators, as Judith Goleman, former professor of English at UMass Boston, explained. “I could barely finish my dissertation [when Goleman found Freire’s work]! All I wanted to do was to start writing about the teaching of language and literacy with the Freirean dialectic,” said Goleman. While working on her dissertation in the mid-70s, she found in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressedwhat she could not find with any other theorist at that time: a theory of teaching deeply rooted in politics and dialogics.
While Brazil lived through the strongest moments of cultural repression under the dictatorship in the 70s, the US experienced a change in cultural values that attracted followers to Freire’s philosophy. “The book Pedagogy of the Oppressed had an immense impact on North American educators who were becoming politicized through the United States’ involvement with the colonial war, through the opposition to that war, and also through the Civil War movement in this country,” Goleman explained.
The Independent was founded just one year before Freire coming to Harvard; Vietnam protests on Harvard campus inspired the beginning of this counterculture newspaper and increased the interest in Freire’s work.
Radicalized educators who often took part in protests on college campuses, explains Goleman, were attracted to Freire’s analyses that applied the topics of oppression to the sphere of teaching and learning at a point when the term pedagogy was highly unused and had a negative connotation. Goleman becomes emotional by recalling her own experiences being a political educator inspired by Freire, and declares that “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed just blew people’s minds.”
Goleman recommends Freire’s more informal works, which have less of what students can consider “dense Marxist theory” that make his books theoretically complex. “He has a series of interviews with his collaborator Donaldo Macedo (from UMass Boston), where you get a much more discursive Freire. Also I love his book Letters to Cristina to his niece. Many are very sweet, and they also provide a tremendous amount of insight into how he became sensitive to impoverishment and oppression[…] He tells the story of his own early years in very narrative personal ways and then makes the connection to Marxist theory!”
Freire’s thought was highly influenced by his working class upbringing in Brazil. Growing up during the Great Depression, he experienced hunger and poverty at a young age, and dedicated his life to educating the “esfarrapados do mundo,” or “the ragged of the world”. Accused of subversion after the Brazilian military coup, and imprisoned for his Socialist-leaning thought, his work was quickly known in the United States. A few years before, he was presented to the North American society through an article in the New York Times that presented his work at Angicos, where he famously provided literacy-teaching to 300 rural workers in 40 hours with a politicizing and dialogical method, using words from the context of the workers and investigating their meanings.
Freire, who described his ideology as equal parts Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, negotiated against Harvard’s initial offer of as a two-year professor to shorten his term to one year so that he could also accept an invitation from the World Council of Churches. From a translated interview with Claudius Ceccon in the counterculture journal Pasquim entitled “Paulo Freire, in the exile, became even more Brazilian,” Freire said. “I’d rather go to the Council because it’d provide me possibilities that the University would not… I am a professor in a street’s corner. I don’t need the context of a university to be an educator.”
Afraid of losing his ties to Latin America and popular education, Freire left the Center for Studies in Education and Development at Harvard after just one year—as he then said, what made him a professor was that he taught in the “corners of the world,” not at a university.
Freire’s cultural shock on his time at Cambridge is one I often try to picture, being myself a Brazilian in North American lands. How was his daily life in the one year he spent in Cambridge?
Goleman recalled, “Being in the US was very disorienting for [Friere] because he wasn’t confident in his use of English, and there were all these people around that he didn’t know.” In his interview with Claudius Ceccon, Freire said, “I didn’t even know how to say good morning.”
Freire attended a dinner in Cambridge, MA, with Goleman, Goleman’s mentor Ann Berthoff, and other professors. “We all felt that Freire was the figure of renown at the dinner; but he clapped his hands, laid back in his chair, and said he always wanted to meet her. I thought she was going to faint,” said Goleman. The surprise was not only due to his characteristic humbleness, but because of his deep admiration to a work that did not follow the same political theoretical grounds as he did.
Carolina Lindquist ’26 (carolinalindquist@college.harvard.edu) would have liked to be an ant at any dinner with Freire.