Politics and education in Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Opp ressed”

two dimensions of the reading of reality

Abstract

On the threshold of completing 50 years, the work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is revisited here, aiming to answer why Paulo Freire is simultaneously an important reference to both politics and education. To answer this, we question how the ideas defended by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed unfold in a more detailed and explicit way for political practice in later works. It is argued that in historical moments such as the resumption of social movements in Brazil in the second half of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, such ideas were central to transformative political practice. Then, we stress how the ideas defended by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed unfold in a more detailed and explicit way in pedagogical practice in later works such as Pedagogy of Autonomy and Education in the City. In the end, our reflection focuses on the hypothesis that what allows his simultaneous influence in these two areas is his radically humanizing conception of the world and human being, which makes him an indispensable author in the transformation of the world in our time, covering both the educational and political spheres.