Paulo Freire

Hello dear classmates and teacher!!

Today I'm going to talk about Paulo Freire, a Brazilian teacher.

He was born on september 19th, 1921, in Recife, Brazil.

When He was a child he suffer from poverty due to the great depression of 1929. This experience made him interest in the poor, and it also helped him to build his education proposal. He study philosophy and psychology in the Faculty of law of the University of Recife. But he never practice his profession. Instead he chose to teach  Portuguese in a Highschool of Brazil.  In one of his books, Paulo Freire tells how he decided to drop out of law and become a teacher. He talks about a meeting he had once with a client, and he tells him he is going to be seize by debts, and he was so sad that asked him for help. To hear this and figure out that there was way to help him out, he decided to quit, because this will gave him another week to find another lawyer. This was an excuse, it was a way of helping, but it was also a time to make a decision. Freire felt like the only way to help out was teaching.

In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, an a elementary school teacher. 

He worked with poor children who didn't know how to read or write. He created a different method to learn how to read and write.  In 1964 was State's coup in Brazil and for this Paulo Freire was imprison for 70 days. He was exile to Bolivia, and then to Chile.

Finally, he died on may 2th, in 1997, in Brazil.

He publish his first book in 1967 called "The education as practice of freedom". The most famous book that he wrote was "Pedagogy of the oppressed"

I like Paulo Freire because is an example of compromise, passion, and dedication.

And to reflect, I leave a sentence by Paulo Freire about education:

"To teach to read and write, is not learn how to repeat words, but rather is to learn how to say your own word"