Paulo Freire: a thinker of praxis, an itinerant thinker, a universal thinker

ABSTRACT

The tone of this article is biographical and theoretical. Biographical, insofar as it concerns the author and his circumstances while also serving as a testimonial, probably partial and idiosyncratic, of the successes experienced by an entire generation of Argentineans in Diaspora. Although biographical, this is also a theoretical text that reviews the arguments that made the work of Freire and a generation of pedagogues for liberation relevant 55 years after Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published.

KEYWORDS:

• Paulo Freire
• Argentina
• Julio Barreiro
• Emilio Mignone
• Utopia
• education and politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In my article with Raymond Allen Morrow, Theory and Methods of Paulo Freire, I draw a brief biographical profile of Freire’s trajectory and his impact, especially in the First World and the United States.

2 See Torres (2016) (anthology of three books published by Carlos Alberto Torres in 1979 by Edições Loyola). https://direcionalescolas.com.br/carlos-alberto-torres-lanca-antologia-sobre-paulo-freire-na-livraria-cortez-em-sao-paulo/ In Spanish see Torres, Carlos Alberto. Lectura crítica de Paulo Freire. Denes & Instituto Paulo Freire D’Espanya, 2006.

3 I want to pay homage here to one of the most clear-thinking and committed social scientists in Latin America, Atilio Alberto Borón, who was the General Secretary of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, CLACSO, and Director of my Master’s thesis. In his classes and in countless hours of private conversation in Mexico City, I developed my taste for Political Science. I want, above all, to thank him for his unconditional support in what were very difficult years for me.

4 Under pressure from the Peronist labor movement, Cámpora and Vice President Solano Lima tendered their resignations on 13 July. Perón’s sovereign presence in the country had nullified the new government’s power and the violent clash between left- and right-wing Peronistas in the Aeroporto of Ezeiza upon arrival of Peron, on the fateful day of 20 June 1973, had exploded negotiations in the bosom of Peronism. The slaughter at Ezeiza left a torrent of casualties difficult to count because both sides secreted their wounded and death, and reports have always been imprecise. Even so, there was talk of 500 dead, faced with what might have been an enormous tragedy due to the presence of more than a million of us citizens who were walking to the Ezeiza airport to greet Perón on his definitive return from Spain. This bloody day marked the rupture of any kind of pact between the different Peronista factions and the beginning of a far from silent, very public struggle that culminated with the assassination of José Rucci – the worker’s leader closest to Perón – and the old caudillo’s breaking with the Montoneros. With Perón’s death and the ascendancy of the Vice President, Isabel Martínez de Perón, the Montoneros refused to recognize the government and went underground – they had already fused with Peronist Armed Forces – and re-instigated the anti-governmental activities of the ERP—Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo – a Trotskyite cell, which led to daring assaults on army barracks, like the Comando de Sanidad and the Blue barracks, both violently repelled with many insurgents slain.

5 Which became known as the ‘Rodrigazo’, with the political ascension of the engineer Celestino Rodriguez who tripled the price of gasoline, drastically devalued the peso, and substantially raised taxes on public services. This provoked the first labor strike against a Peronista government, on7 July 1975.

6 For an analysis of the links between religion and hegemony in Latin America and my observations as a participant in the nascent Theology of Liberation, see my book The Church, Society and Hegemony. A Critical Study of Religion in Latin America. Westport, CT and London, UK: Praeger, 1992. Preface by Enrique Dussel, translated from Spanish by R. A. Young.

7 Similar experiments in the United States were found in many states, not only in terms of the link with nature through ecological production – e.g. the Permaculture movement--but also movements to expand the production of adobe and straw-bale houses, considered economical and ecological for the energy they saved.

8 The emblematic book of this period, is Cartas desde Guinea Bissau. Apuntes de una experiencia pedagógica en proceso [Letters from Guinea Bissau: Notes from a pedagogical experiment in process] Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1977. which shows Paulo Freire’s Marxist side.

9 Many years later I learned that the same accusation had been made against Freire in Brazil when he was interrogated and imprisoned for 70 days in Recife for being ‘part of a Marxist conspiracy’.

10 Documentation having to do with ‘Operation Condor’ can be found in many places on the Internet.

11 A distinguished Argentinean lawyer and educator who was undersecretary of education and also a functionary of the Organization of American States (OAS) and would be one of the founders, along with his wife, of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organization and of a human rights institute, el Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales; both organizations were among the first to confront the violence of the State, putting their members’ lives at enormous risk, searching for sons and daughters who had disappeared, attempting to get to the bottom of the plot of this monstrous operation of State violence run by the military governments from 1976 to 1983.

12 Such ‘grupos de tareas’ of the Argentinean Armed Forces combined soldiers, military and civil police.

13 It is worth mentioning, and not just as a historic curiosity, that the archives of the CIDOC – Intercultural Documentation Center – created by Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca and frequented by radical thinkers like Paulo Freire, Everett Reimer, Erich Fromm and so many others, are now stored in the Colegio de México’s excellent library in Ajusco, Mexico City.

14 Torres and Morrow (2002); Torres, O’Cadiz, and Wong (1998); Torres (1998a); Gadotti et al. (1996); Torres (1994a); Torres (1998c); Freire and Torres (1994); Torres and Freire (1994); Torres (1994b); O’Cadiz, and Torres (1994); Torres (1994c); Freire and Torres (1993); Morrow and Torres (1998a). In Portuguese, Morrow and Torres (1998b); Torres (1992); Torres (1981); Torres (1980); Torres (1977); Torres (1976a; 1976b).

15 See Torres (2003).

16 See the preface by Moacir Gadotti to my book First Freire. Torres (2014). This book received the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education in 2015. Translation to Chinese by Pro-Ed Publishing Company, Taipei, Taiwan, 2017. Moacir Gadotti is Freire’s principal biographer and one of the best philosophers of education in Latin America. He was the director and founder of the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo, Brazil and one of those few extraordinary friends with whom we can entrust our very lives.

17 See Herbert Marcuse’s masterful text, Reason and Revolution.

18 From Paulo Freire and Ana P. Quiroga. Interrogantes y propuestas en educación. Ideales, mitos y utopias a fines del siglo XX. [Questions and proposals in education. Ideals, myths and utopias at the end of the twentieth century] Buenos Aires, Ediciones Cinco, 1995, p. 27.

19 In R. C. Tucker (1978), 21–22.

20 See, for example, The Rule of Metaphor. Multidisciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translation by Robert Czernyi. Toronto and Buffalo: the University of Toronto Press, 1977

21 In the past decade, intellectuals like Henry Giroux have postulated the need for teachers to become public intellectuals. Others have insisted that it is necessary for teachers to be organic intellectuals of the working classes and popular sectors. This is not the place for a treatment of these positions and there are some extremely suggestive books on the subject, like Beatriz Sarlo’s Tiempo Presente. Notas sobre el intercambio de cultura. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2001. Another interesting book is Escobar, Fernandez, and Guevara-Niebla (1994). In this book, I discuss some of the postures connected to traditional intellectuals, Gramscian intellectuals and institutional intellectuals.

22 Moacir Gadotti (2004), p. 169

23 Reading the World. Paulo Freire in Conversation with Dr. Carlos Torres. Access [Cable TV] Network, Alberta, Canada, 1991.

24 Carlos Alberto Torres (1998a).

25 George W. Bush, Commencement Address at Yale University, 1991. Cited in Carlos Alberto Torres (2004).

26 See Mark Ginsburg (1995), xxv–xxxvii. For an analysis playing with the limits between fiction and reality in the politics of education, see Carlos Alberto Torres, “Fictional Dialogues on Teachers, Politics, and Power in Latin America.” In Mark Ginsburg, ibidem, 133–168.

27 Paulo Freire, Politics and Education, Los Angeles, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1998—translated by Pia Lindquist Wong, with an introduction entitled “The Political Pedagogy of Paulo Freire” by Carlos Alberto Torres, 46.

28 Op. cit., 70.

29 Paulo Freire, cited in Moacir Gadotti, Pedagogía de la Tierra, México, Siglo XXI, 2002, p. 27.

30 Paulo Freire, in Freire and Quiroga, op. cit., 61.

31 Paulo Freire, cited in Moacir Gadotti, Pedagogía de la Tierra, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2002, p. 27.