Paulo Freire: Rousseau of the Twentieth Century

Paulo Freire INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN ADULT EDUCATION Volume 5 Series Editor: Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Msida, ...

Author: Asoke Bhattacharya

60 downloads 1395 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Paulo Freire

INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN ADULT EDUCATION Volume 5 Series Editor: Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Msida, Malta Scope: This international book series attempts to do justice to adult education as an ever expanding field. It is intended to be internationally inclusive and attract writers and readers from different parts of the world. It also attempts to cover many of the areas that feature prominently in this amorphous field. It is a series that seeks to underline the global dimensions of adult education, covering a whole range of perspectives. In this regard, the series seeks to fill in an international void by providing a book series that complements the many journals, professional and academic, that exist in the area. The scope would be broad enough to comprise such issues as ‘Adult Education in specific regional contexts’, ‘Adult Education in the Arab world’, ‘Participatory Action Research and Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Participatory Citizenship’, ‘Adult Education and the World Social Forum’, ‘Adult Education and Disability’, ‘Adult Education in Prisons’, ‘Adult Education, Work and Livelihoods’, ‘Adult Education and Migration’, ‘The Education of Older Adults’, ‘Southern Perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Progressive Social Movements’, ‘Popular Education in Latin America and Beyond’, ‘Eastern European perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘An anti-Racist Agenda in Adult Education’, ‘Postcolonial perspectives on Adult Education’, ‘Adult Education and Indigenous Movements’, ‘Adult Education and Small States’. There is also room for single country studies of Adult Education provided that a market for such a study is guaranteed. Editorial Advisory Board: Paula Allman, Research Fellow, University of Nottingham, England Stephen Brookfield, University of St Thomas, Minnesota, USA Phyllis Cunningham, University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne, USA Waguida El Bakary, American University in Cairo, Egypt Budd L. Hall, University of Victoria, BC, Canada Astrid Von Kotze, University of Natal, South Africa Alberto Melo, University of the Algarve, Portugal Lidia Puigvert-Mallart, CREA-University of Barcelona, Spain Daniel Schugurensky, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada Joyce Stalker, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand/Aotearoa Juha Suoranta, University of Tampere, Finland

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6091-513-0 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-514-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-515-4 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands www.sensepublishers.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Prof. Jens Holger Schjoerring

v

Paulo Freire Rousseau of the Twentieth Century Asoke Bhattacharya Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. ix Preface..................................................................................................................... xi 1. Social, Economic and Political Condition of Brazil from Colonial to Modern Times ................................................................................................. 1 2. Paulo Freire: Relevant Biography...................................................................... 95 3. Critique of Paulo Freire’s Major Works .......................................................... 173 4. Freire: The Master as They Saw Him .............................................................. 283

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This book is the outcome of several years of research on the life and work of Paulo Freire. I could not have even ventured to write it if I did not have the unstinted support of Prof. Jens Holger Schjoerring, who adorned the chair of Director of the Centre for Grundtvig Studies of the University of Aarhus. He had made it possible for me to get the books written by Paulo Freire and on him through the kind courtesy of Dr. Kim Arne Pedersen, a renowned Grundtvig scholar. In fact, under Prof. Schjoerring, the Centre for Grundtvig Studies of the University of Aarhus became an international meeting place for scholars from all over the world to discuss comparative educational issues – thoughts of Grundtvig, Freire and Tagore. This book is dedicated to him. I am grateful to Prof. Ove Korsgaard of Danish University School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, for writing the preface Prof. Korsgaard is the doyen of adult education in Scandinavia. I wanted to get the book passed through the sieve of his critical evaluation. I am happy that he has found the book worthy. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Sid Bradley, Emeritus professor of the University of York, for his copious editorial advice. The book has been edited by Pradipta Sankar Sen, a renowned editor . Without his painstaking efforts this book could not be printed. Atanu Sarkar has typeset the book. I am grateful to them. Sense Publishers has always been extremely courteous. I am grateful to Peter de Liefde for publishing the book. Bernice Kelly proved to be an excellent liaison between the author and the publisher. I am indebted to her. In spite of the efforts, direct and indirect, of so many individuals if there still persist inaccuracies, printing and editing mistakes, none but the author is responsible. Prof. Asoke Bhattacharya Kolkata November 2, 2010

ix

PREFACE

Throughout the last long years of my life I’ve been involved with history of educational ideas, I have often returned to Immanuel Kant, who, in his book ‘On Pedagogy’ from 1803, argues that the art of governing and the art of education are among man’s most important social inventions. According to Kant, certain structural similarities exist between the formation of a society and the formation of a human being. To act politically is to shape a society; to act educationally is to shape an individual. Formation of a society and formation of a person are therefore closely related - without being the same. The relationship can be described as an egg-or-chicken paradox: what comes first, the good and proper community or the good and proper citizen. It is therefore no coincidence that some of the great political philosophers are included in the canon of major educational philosophers; Plato, Martin Luther, John Locke, Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Humboldt, N.F.S. Grundtvig, John Dewey, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Their educational philosophy can not be isolated from their political philosophy. In much educational thinking, however, the connection between political philosophy and educational philosophy drops out of sight, and pedagogy is reduced to methodological and didactic matters. With this voluminous book on Paulo Freire, Professor Asoke Bhattacharya reminds us of the close relationship between politics and pedagogy. Professor Bhattacharya’s book clearly illustrates that Paulo Freire, in the latter half of the twentieth century, re-established the connection between educational philosophy and political philosophy. Freire established a conductive connection between politics and pedagogy based on his own experiences. Paulo Freire was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Brazil, but the family lost everything in 1929. As a young man, Freire experienced poverty and even hunger, and he learned that the Brazilian upper class had little interest in the problems of the lower classes, and so he soon became involved in the fight against poverty and oppression through education. Paulo Freire has been hailed as one of the founding fathers of critical pedagogy, which is not wrong, but not very precise either. For who among the major educational philosophers were not critical? Rousseau was extremely critical to his contemporary pedagogy and school system, and Luther, Kant, Grundtvig, Dewey, and Tagore all formulated their pedagogical philosophies in critical opposition to contemporary educational theory and practice. The same can be said of Paulo Freire. Therefore, it is not Freire’s critical attitude, but his political activism that sets him apart from some (but not all) of the canonical educational philosophers. Professor Asoke Bhattacharya provides a thorough description of Paulo Freire as a political activist: Freire was one of the founding members of The Movement for Popular Culture, which was the first of a series of political educational movements that emerged in Brazil in the 1960s. The purpose was to empower the xi

PREFACE

poor to lift themselves out of poverty without alienating them through an education that did not take their culture and their own experience into account. Therefore, the movement put great emphasis on preserving the people’s cultural traditions, their histories, their mythical characters and their religiosity - a philosophical approach that resembles Grundtvig and the Danish folk high school movement, which from the mid-1800s was set up to educate the rural population. In his masterpiece ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, Freire gave his definition of the political nature of education and the relationship between knowledge, power and language. In that book, which was based on his own experience from fighting illiteracy in Brazil, Paulo Freire formulated his famous pedagogical method to make agricultural workers aware of their social situation and to contribute to their emancipation. A wealth of literature has been published about Paulo Freire, but nothing as comprehensive as this book. This book distinguishes itself by a detailed account of the historical, economic and social context, and on this basis Professor Bhattacharya draws a fascinating and comprehensive picture of one of the most famous and influential educational philosophers from the last half of the twentieth century. Professor Ove Korsgaard, Dr. Ped. Danish University School of Education University of Aarhus Denmark

xii

CHAPTER 1

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONDITION OF BRAZIL FROM COLONIAL TO MODERN TIMES

SOCIAL SECTION – 1 I

Around the 1530s the economic and social organizations of the Brazilian society began to crystalize. Over the previous 100 years the Portuguese had been in contact with other nations in the continents of Africa and Asia. This knowledge of other peoples and cultures and the experience of adapting to a new economic, social, and cultural environment were instrumental in the attitudinal transformation of the Portuguese to settle down to an agricultural existence in Brazil mainly in the regions of Pernambuco and Sao Vicente. The Brazilian society, thus, was organized with its roots firmly on the ground. It developed into a patriarchal pattern with slavery as the principal instrument of production. A sort of miscegenation of the Portuguese with the local indigenous inhabitants that took place during this period was also a significant development. In the parlance of political economy, in tropical America, this was a society which was agrarian in structure, slave-holding in production relations and hybrid in human composition. Thus, a relationship of master and slave – physically exploitative and mentally crippling – developed in Brazil. The rough edges were, however, smoothened a bit by the effect of miscegenation. The new society in Brazil was an extension of the society of Portugal in some respects. The cultural past of the society in Portugal was a complex intermingling of elements of three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia, and developed a unique character of its own. The African influence gave a sharp relief to sexual life, to alimentation boost and religion. Asian (Arabic) and African bloods ran through the veins of a large section of the population. The cultural influences mitigated the Germanic and Nordic harshness of institutions and cultural forms and corrupted the doctrinal and moral rigidity of the medieval church. The result was salubrious. Christianity, feudalism, Gothic architecture, canonic discipline, Visigoth law and Latin language got rid of the abrasiveness found in their unalloyed existences. Under the apparent rule of Europe reigned an Asianised Africa. The Portuguese character had been moulded by the tense and vibrant conditions of human contact with other nations and peoples. The constant state of confrontation had made the Portuguese tough as a race. The system allowed the victors in Brazil to utilize their captives as agricultural labourers. Total or partial enslavement was 1

CHAPTER 1

encouraged in Portugal. Miscegenation also took place as a by-product. This portrait of an historic Portugal existed from time immemorial: before the Arabs and the Berbers or the Libyo–Phoenicians, Semitic and Negroid waves broke against those of the North. To the tri–continentalism which contributed to a sort of dualism of culture and race could be added some other characteristics: the Semitic element might have endowed the Portuguese with mobility, plasticity and adaptability. These could have contributed towards instilling among the Portuguese an acumen for navigation and cosmopolitanism in the 15th century. These could also have contributed towards making the Portuguese colonizer of Brazil endowed with appropriate physical and psychological characteristics for adapting to an alien land and difficult situations. This mobility and adaptability were instrumental in overcoming the scarcity of population in the mother country and in populating regions situated across thousands of kilometers–in Asia, Africa and the numerous islands and archipelagoes in Portuguese possession. The inadequacy of manpower was made up through mobility and miscibility. The Portuguese colonizers dominated enormous spaces, took wives and concubines in diverse parts of the world and begot off-springs with a procreative fervor that was due as much to violent instincts on the part of the individual as it was to a calculated policy engineered by the state for economic and political reasons. Warriors, administrators, technicians and businessmen were shifted about by the colonial headquarters in Lisbon like pieces on a chess-board: from Asia to America, from Africa to Asia or from Africa to America. Duarte Coelho, who had amassed enormous wealth in India, was called to Pernambuco. His sons, trained in fighting the American aborigines, were summoned to fight in Africa. Skilled sugar technicians from Madeira island were brought to the plantations of Northern Brazil. Ships constantly plied across the continents. Millions of black Africans were transshipped as agricultural labourers to Brazil. Experts have claimed that no colonizing people in the modern times could match the Portuguese in miscegenation1. Miscibility was the process by which the Portuguese made up for their deficiency in human resources in large-scale colonization of far-flung areas. The effort was effective as the Portuguese of postmedieval times were themselves the product of large-scale intermingling with the Arabs who were highly skilled technically and possessed intellectual and artistic qualities considered superior to the Nordics2. However, in spite of the Portuguese characteristics of mobility, adaptability and miscibility, the undertaking in Brazil was really enormous. In this new land, everything was in disequilibrium. The soil was not suitable for cultivation of products that the Portuguese desired. Rugged, intractable and impermeable, the land could not be utilized for agriculture. The big rivers were mostly rebellious and not conducive to regularized farming. Floods and droughts alternatively ravaged the colonies. There were swarms of larvae and many species of insects and worms which made human life, particularly European, unbearable. The big plantations in Brazil were created by courageous individuals who received little or no assistance from the state. It is through individual efforts that the first colonies were established and the families were settled. Development of 2

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONDITION OF BRAZIL

agriculture, animal husbandry, sugar plantation, trade and commerce were the result of private initiatives. Defense of the settlements was also the responsibility of private individuals and not of the State. The absence of a regular and complicated system of administration and the freedom of action that was enjoyed by the colonialists proved to be an effective method in the colonization of Brazil. From the 16th century onwards, the family played the vital role in colonization. It organized the productive unit, the capital for clearing the bushes, and helped found the plantations. It purchased the slaves, oxen and implements. In politics, it was the social force that set itself up as the most powerful colonial aristocracy in the Americas. It was due to the presence of a strong and weighty element represented by the big landowning families that Portuguese colonization in Brazil soon assumed those social aspects, which were quite unique in comparison with Spanish or English colonizers. The Portuguese colonialist in Brazil was left with no other option than to resort to a kind of life which was mainly agricultural. Considering the background of the Portuguese in international trade and commerce, the rural mode of life in Brazil was something that the colonialist was forced to accept. Both the land and its inhabitants were in a crude state. The men and women encountered were savages, running about naked, sleeping in hammocks, and feeding on flour, jungle fruit and game or fish, eaten raw or roasted. They possessed no domestic animals to serve them. Instead of wealth that the Europeans found in Asia or in other parts of Latin America, the Portuguese found an infinite number of brazil wood trees and pipereeds in Brazil. Enormous masses of water and extensive jungles conferred grandeur upon this land. The whole scenario was quite dramatic. However, as stated before, the rivers and waterfalls were, to a large extent, unsuitable for satisfying human needs. The floods would destroy everything–crop, houses and people. In the initial stages, therefore, the colonialists had little enthusiasm in populating the land. The smaller streams were more useful. The water from these sources was used for crushing the cane, irrigating the river plains, cultivating the crop and transporting sugar, lumber and other goods across the country. During the formative stages, Brazilian society did not have to face much racial discrimination. Throughout the 16th century, the gates of the colony were open to the foreigners. If there was any discrimination, it was against the non-Catholics, claim some experts3. This religious uniformity was the primary cause, the same sources claim, to develop the solidarity of the Portuguese and other Catholics for fighting against the French Calvinists, the Reformed Dutch, the English Protestants and other invaders. Brazilianism and Catholicism intermingled to form a distinct entity. The colonial administration in Brazil lacked the centralism that was displayed by the Spaniards in the spheres of their domination. It was slack and weak. Later on, it was rendered a little rigid with the creation of the office of the GovernorGeneral. Sugarcane cultivation first started at Sao Vicente and Pernambuco, and was later extended to Bahia and Maranhao. A slave-holding aristocracy developed in the 3

CHAPTER 1

sugar-cane plantations in these regions. Divisions among these plantation-owners grew later when many plantations went bankrupt. The owners, dispossessed of their property, scattered throughout the backlands in quest of slaves. Many settled as cattle-raisers. In this diaspora grew groups like sertanejo (backlander) and vaqueri (the cowboy) in Brazil. These groups opposed slavery. The identity of agrarian and slave-holding interests that prevailed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the sugar plantations in the Northeast continued when the mines were discovered and coffee cultivation was started in the southern regions. Though the economy shifted from sugar to gold and then to coffee, the instrument of exploitation was still the slave. With the emergence of a new center of gravity so far as the economy was concerned, the slaves of African origin, who had remained en bloc in the Northeast, migrated to these new areas causing profound cultural changes. So far as the subsistence economy was concerned, the same native or European plants were cultivated in the new areas of settlement. Thus a cultural miscegenation of the Indian, African and European elements took place throughout the country. Monoculture (cultivation of sugar, coffee or other agricultural product exclusively for export) deprived the Brazilian society of its natural sources of nutrition. It also caused disequilibrium in nature since the crop was an extraneous one. These two factors affected the physical development and economic efficiency of the Brazilians. The best nourished of the Brazilian society were the whites of the big houses. The black slave was exploited ruthlessly, but they had to be fed. The lower middle class and the lower classes were the most undernourished sections of the population, claimed some authorities. They fell victim to paludic anaemia, beriberi, worms, and buboes. The indigenous people were ruined by nutritional insufficiency, alcoholism and various other ailments. Around six million people out of 12 million were thus affected. Even the aristocracy in colonial Brazil lacked in their diet fresh vegetables, meat and milk. They suffered from various ailments of the digestive tract. During the three centuries of colonial rules the shadow of a sterilizing monoculture lay over all. The rural gentry were in debt most of the times. Termites, floods and droughts interfered with the food supply for the majority of the population. Only the most privileged families of Pernambuco and Bahia were steeped in luxury. However, even this luxury was superficial since many essential things were in short supply. In Para, in the 17th century, families of certain noblemen were unable to visit the city to celebrate Christmas since the young ladies lacked appropriate dresses. The common diet of game and fish which were abundant in the early days grew rare in proportion as the number of inhabitants increased. The land, left untilled or without intelligent cultivation lost its primitive fertility with the result that many inhabitants left for better opportunities. Salvador de Bahia, a great and prosperous center, was reputed for bad and deficient food supplies. Nowhere was the scarcity so acutely felt as in Pernambuco. The region was dotted with sugar plantations and large estates. At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, it was reckoned to be the best land for agricultural purposes. However, it was here that essential items of daily diet were lacking the most. 4


The black slave in Brazil, argues an eminent scholar4, was the best nourished person of the Brazilian society as his diet contained a large portion of vegetables. The influence of the Africans, particularly in matters of diet, was the primary reason for the physical strength of the cross-bred population formed through the admixture of these races–the indigenous Indian, the black and the white. The hybrid population–free mulatto or mestizo–was in most cases victim of paludic anaemia, beriberi and worms. It was because of the fact that this population formed largely the lowest rung of the free people and had to fend for themselves. Even a black slave, it has been argued, was protected by the master for sheer economic reasons. Unlike the free mulatto or caboclo, he had the advantage of living in conditions that were preservative rather than depreciative. They were in a better position to resist pathogenic and social influences and were able to propagate descendants who were healthier and more vigorous. However, they could not resist the onslaught of syphilis which spread from the big houses to the senzalas (slave-hut), or vice-versa. The son of a plantation owner would contract it almost as he played with the black or mulatto girls, acquiring precociously his first sexual experience at the age of twelve or thirteen. From that age onward the lad used to be subjected to ridicule for not having had carnal knowledge of a woman. He would be the butt of jest if he could not show the scars of syphilis on his body. The new society which was based upon a very unequal relationship between the white master race and the black and Indian slaves, gave rise to a very significant social and physical malady largely due to the outbreak of syphilis, especially in the big houses. The disease was the most deforming in its effect. It drained the economic energy of the Brazilians–especially the hybrids. It has been argued5 that the disease made its maiden appearance from the first union of Europeans, wandering aimlessly along the shores, with the Indian women who offered themselves to the white man’s sexual embrace. Therefore, contrary to the common belief that civilization and syphilis went hand in hand, Brazil was syphylicised before it was civilized. [Recent studies have revealed that indigenous America knew of this disease before the Europeans]6 The sexual union of the white master with his black or Indian female slaves brought about a species of sadism on the part of the white man and masochism on the part of the African or Indian counterpart. This became the predominant feature in the sexual and social relations in Brazil. The furious passions of the Portuguese must have been vented upon victims who did not always share his sexual tastes. The sadistic impulses of man towards woman in Brazilian society can be traced to the relationship of the master’s son to the slave boy, companion of the white child in the big houses. Through the submission of the black boy in the games that they played together and especially when they played levapancadas (take a drubbing), the white boy was often initiated into the sadism that he displayed in his later years. The sadism of the small boy or the adolescent was transformed into a taste for administering thrashings or for pulling out the teeth of the slave who had stolen his sugar cane. More sordid actions were displayed as the adolescent entered manhood. It would come out through his passion for giving violent or perverse 5

CHAPTER 1

commands, either as lord of the manor or as the university educated son occupying an elevated political or administrative position7. One result of this sadism, –the sadism of the conqueror towards the conquered, of the master towards the slave–was its extension in the relationship between man and woman of the big houses. The woman was sexually and socially repressed, living under the shadow of her father or husband. A feminine variety of sadism could also be observed when the woman became a great lady. The slaves, especially the mulatto girls, were often treated in the worst possible manner, the reason very often being envy or sexual jealousy. This sadism of the master and the corresponding masochism of the slave, exceeded the sphere of sexual or domestic life. It made itself felt throughout Brazilian history in a broader social and political life where the passion for command has always found victims upon whom to vent such zeal with sadisfic pleasure. The majority of those who may be called the Brazilian people is still experiencing the pressure exerted upon it by a government that is masculine and aristocratic though headed by people who boast themselves as liberal and revolutionary8. The conservative tradition of Brazil has always been sustained by the sadism of the command, disguised as the principle of authority or the defense of order. Between the two opposite mysticisms, that of order and liberty and that of authority and democracy, the Brazilian political life, emerging from the past experiences, sought to strike a balance. The balance continues to be struck between the sadist and the masochist, master and slave, highly educated and the illiterate, individuals with sophisticated culture influenced by Europe and people with absolutely indigenous culture. The interconnection and fusion of diverse and even antagonistic cultural traditions occur freely in Brazil. But since there are yawning gaps between the two cultures, fusion is achieved only with great difficulty9. This economic, political and cultural dualism–the dichotomy that exists in the Brazilian society–that of master and slave, sadism and masochism, white upper class and black and indigenous people–all these might have contributed to the philosophy of Paulo Freire10. II

The Portuguese did not encounter in Brazil a highly formed civilization as the Spanish encountered in other parts of Latin America – the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas. Theirs was not a meeting of two highly developed cultures. What the Portuguese saw on the shores of Brazil was bands of grown-up children with an incipient, unripe culture. The Amerindian reaction in Brazil was one of pure vegetable sensitivity and contractibility, with the Indians shrinking back out of an incapacity to adapt to the cultural standard of the Portuguese. Hybrid in constitution from the very beginning, Brazilian society showed less disharmony than what was evident in other parts of America – North or South. The conquerors derived the maximum benefit out of their interaction with the conquered race. A society was constituted that was Christian in superstructure, with the recently baptized native woman as the wife and mother of the family who, in her 6


domestic life and economy, made use of many of the traditions, experiences and utensils of the autochthonous folk. For the formidable task of colonizing so extensive a territorry as Brazil, 16th century Portugal had to avail itself of the manpower that was left there, after the adventure in India and Africa. The leftovers consisted mostly of the mozarbic and poor who did not have much racial consciousness like those of fidalogs and the Portuguese of the North. The lustful inclinations of individuals without family ties and surrounded by Amerindian women in the nude served the powerful reasons of the State to populate the new land with mestizo population. The native woman should be seen not only as the physical basis of the Brazilian family. She should also be considered a worthwhile cultural element in the formation of the Brazilian society. With the contribution of the primitive woman, Brazilian life was enriched with a number of the food items and habits that the Brazilians display today. Drugs and household remedies, various traditions bound up with the development of the child, a number of kitchen utensils and processes linked with tropical hygiene which include taking bath regularly - all these helped stabilize the new society in Brazil. The indigenous woman taught the Brazilian Portuguese the use of hammocks to sleep or to use it as a voluptuous couch. She used coconut oil for hair. She also contributed personal neatness, bodily hygiene, corn, cashew and porridge. The Amerindian culture at the time of discovery was nomadic. It was a culture of the forest. Agricultural civilization had not yet sprouted there. Of course, a rudimentary agricultural practice had started; manihot, cara, maize, jerimum, peanut and papaw were being cultivated. This kitchen gardening was the preoccupation of women. Men despised these tasks. They were mainly hunters, fishermen and warriors. It is generally assumed that when two cultures meet, the so-called ‘superior’ culture tends to dominate the other. In many cases, as a result of this domination, the other culture becomes extinct. From the 16th century onward, the missionary has been a great destroyer of non-European culture. Under the influence of the fathers of the Society of Jesus, colonization took a puritan turn. This stifled much of the native spontaneity. The Jesuits substituted the songs of the aborigines which were filled with flavour of life in the wilds, with dry and mechanical hymns of devotion. Upon the natural regional differences in speech, was superimposed a single tongue–Portuguese. The caboclos were compelled to do away with the dances and festivals that were impregnated with the instincts, interests and animal energy of the conquered race. The Jesuits sought to destroy or castrate, every virile expression of religious or artistic culture that was not in agreement with catholic morality or European conventions. They took away art from life. And a foundation was laid in Brazil for an art that was not an expression of the physical and psychical energy of the people. An artificial culture was imposed upon the people. However, even in the face of a constant endeavour to erase the Amerindian culture, the primitive people retained some of their cultural traditions. The Jesuits segregated the aboriginal population in large settlements. This altered the very 7

CHAPTER 1

rhythm of their existence. People accustomed to a scattered and roaming life were pressed into an immobile and forced settlement. The harmful effects – depopulation, degeneration and degradation – were the results of contact with the ‘superior’ culture. The food habit as well as the mode of labour were changed and this affected their metabolism. Many diseases took epidemic proportions when these affected the indigenous people. It has been pointed out by many experts11 that the standard of physical cleanliness of the aborigines was far superior to that of the Europeans. The aborigines were used to taking bath everyday – and some several times each day. The Europeans did not bathe even once a month. When the Jesuit padres clad them, they resisted this alien culture constantly. The garb was coming into the way of their natural contact with nature. Thanks to some chroniclers12, we are now acquainted with many of the intimate details of the daily life of the aborigines; for example, the sexual division of their labour. The work in the field was wholly assigned to the women. They also tended children and cared for the house. The males used to plant trees in the forest, as well as burn the forest down and clear the land. They were also assigned to look for firewood to be lit near the hammock. However, the chief responsibility of the male was to furnish the village with meat and fish and protect it against enemies and wild animals. Beside some activities which were shared by men and women, cotton-fibre hammocks and ribbon-like lace work were exclusively made by women. The older women were entrusted to make the flour. They were also assigned the task of making clay vessels, for example, jugs for wine and pots for fermenting beverages. The women planted crops and fetched water from the springs. They also prepared food and looked after the young ones. In the primitive community the old women had a very important role. Importance of women in general was also very great. The art of ceramics must have been the woman’s gift. Artistic production that was exclusively or principally the work of men consisted of making bows and arrows, musical instruments and certain ornaments. In building houses, men laboured much and also built fences around the village for protection. It was the task of men to fashion out the canoes out of a single log. The primitive people of Brazil used manihot flour as the staple food. It was more wholesome than wheat, say chroniclers. It was digested easily. The Brazilians all over the country took a liking for this over wheat. The native delicacies made of manihot flour betrayed familiarity of old knowledge – so much so that the Brazilians of today forget that this is basically the forest culture that remains with them. The taste of the palate, the rhythm of the daily speech and many other cultural traits the Brazilians have come from their Tupi or Tapioca ancestors. The hammock including the hammock-cradle was handed down by the natives to the Europeans. Many an illustrious personality from the Northeast were reared in the hammock. The Indian child grew up free of corporal punishment and of paternal or maternal discipline. The primitive people of Brazil had no idea of private property. It was in sharp contrast to the Portuguese colonists’ notion about property. The cultural differences 8


came in sharp focus when the two communities came into closer contact with each other. Indigenous women came into the lives of the colonists as wives, concubines, mothers of families, wet-nurses and cooks. Through these diverse roles, the native women found outlets for self-expression in activities suited to their sex and this gave them stability which was not available in a nomadic life. The indigenous man, on the contrary, found life among the colonists almost impossible to bear. He had either to work hard in the field or he was forced to read books or do sums which the padres wanted him to do. These activities had the effect of diverting his energy into channels that were most repugnant to the primitive man’s mental framework. The padres did not allow them to get familiar with the European tools. But these were the very things they wanted most. Other practices offended an instinct in them that was deeply ingrained - the sexual division of labour being the most important. They were segregated and interned on plantations and large villages. This was wholly foreign to their normal way of life. The indigenous male child, who had just developed the milk-teeth, was taken out of his mother’s lap by the padre. He was the axis of all missionary activity. It was through this that the child would gradually be reared by the missionary. The padre would fashion his ideal being. In course of time, the indigenous lad would become the accomplice of the invader in drawing the bones, one after another, from the native culture in order that the soft portions might be readily mixed with the patterns of catholic morality and European life. In regard to the mode of intellectual intercourse adopted by the Jesuits, the Indian lad was both the master and the disciple13. The padre while speaking Latin to the Indian lad, was learning the indigenous language from the speech of the listeners. This provided him with an insight which contributed immensely to the knowledge of the language, custom and culture of the indigenous people. In other spheres also the Indian lad was the master: the master, the teacher of his own parents, of the elders of the community, of the people at large. The Indian lad was the ally of the missionary against the practitioners of magic and medicine – a great helping hand for converting the heathen. Through the Indian lad the whole village would praise the glory of Jesus and Mary in the Tupi language. They would even greet each other in Tupi as they do in Europe – so great became the influence of the converted Indian lad. Out of this collaboration of the Jesuit father and the Indian youth sprang Brazilian music and poetry. From the first century of colonization, an astute compromise was effected between the Catholic liturgical style and the native forms of songs. In Brazilian lyrical poetry of the era of colonization, the Jesuits taught those songs which resembled the songs of the Tupinabas. These songs therefore played a vital role in attracting the natives towards Christianity. In an age when popular songs were forbidden by the church, in an age when poetic feelings of the multitudes were completely suffocated and atrophied, the colonist by way of giving expression to the longing in his soul never tired of repeating those sacred compositions which the Jesuits authorized. During this period something fundamental was emerging: the missionaries’ efforts for the fraternization of races. The padres had accorded equal treatment to 9

CHAPTER 1

the students in the class in the 16th and 17th centuries–both the Indian and Portuguese children were treated alike. The chronicles of those periods14 show no discrimination or segregation due to race or colour. Classes in the schools were a process of coeducation of the two races and an assimilation of two cultures–one that of the sons of the soil and the other of the Portuguese conqueror. The patio of such establishments bore this order with maximum ease. The indigenous traditions met and mingled with the European ones. There took place an interchange of games and playthings– new words were in the process of being shaped; the young Indians’ double–stringed bow for hunting birds, the paper kite of the Portuguese children, the rubber ball, the dances–all began to intermingle. Later, the missionaries, due to their orientation or through force of circumstances came to adopt methods of rigorous segregation of the natives in ‘aldeias’ or missionary villages. Apologists of this system15 justified this forced isolation as a remedy against the demoralizing influence of the lax Christians. Through this forced separation from social life, from their own community, or that of the conqueror, they became an artificial population, living apart from the colonial one, a stranger to the latter’s necessities, interests, and aspirations. Thus the indigenous people become like a community of grown up children in a state of paralysis–men and women incapable of normal life and normal development. The next generations of padres did not always remain faithful to the ideals of the first missionaries. When the ‘heroic age’ of the Jesuits in Brazil had passed, a number of missions became something similar to export warehouses, dealing in sugar and drugs, and mate and cacao. The natives then were reduced to mere instruments for commercial exploitation. The missionaries were then accused of promoting marriage of Indians with black women and men, baptizing the off-springs as slaves. Many padres profited from the slave traffic. Fleeing not only segregation and a sedentary mode of life but violence of the benefactors as well, in the missionary villages, many of the christianized natives, especially men made for the jungle, without a thought of the women and children they were leaving behind. The situation became even more acute when, as the powerful civilizing mechanism of the Jesuits was dismantled, the natives found themselves, on one hand, in the light of the morality that had been imposed upon them, under the obligation of supporting their wives and children, and on the other facing the economic conditions that made it impossible for them even to support themselves. The exploitation of the native worker had been so systematized, to the benefits of the whites and the church, that the indigenous worker would receive only one-third of the normal wage. Due to sheer economic reasons many indigenous families broke up. Under such circumstances, the infant death-rate increased and birth-rate decreased as a result of abortions. Thus the Jesuit experiment of bringing civilization to a people without setting up a permanent economic base led to an artificial form of labour incapable of surviving the hothouse atmosphere of the missions, thereby contributing greatly to the degradation of the race it was supposed to serve. The method connected with the capture of the native and his/her segregation as well as excessive forced labour on the plantations or in the missions hastened their 10


depopulation in quite an infernal manner. The methods of capturing the natives and interning them were so cruel and inhuman at times that the percentage of montality was more than that occurred when African slaves were captured, transshipped and exploited. The expeditions carried out in the Amazon regions for supplying slaves or help for the plantations of Maranhao and Para were so atrocious that only one– half arrived at the destination and the other half perished during transport. According to some authorities16, the number that perished was more than what arrived. And for those who arrived at the plantations, especially of sugar, the continuous backbreaking toil they had to contribute was too much for them to bear. Moreover, the diseases that the primitive people acquired upon contact with the whites, and the ill-treatment they received were the causes of their illness and death, notwithstanding the laws against it. It was a common practice to brand the captives with hot iron so as to distinguish them from free people and also to enable the master to recognize him/her. The wars waged by the Portuguese, with an obvious technical superiority on their side, for repressing and punishing the natives had much to do with the depopulation of the native stock. The victors often displayed their superiority over the vanquished by tying the latter to the cannon’s mouth. They would inflict upon them tortures borrowed from classical antiquity and adapted to the conditions in the wilds of America. One of these methods consisted in tying the victim to two fiery horses, then releasing the animals in opposite directions. In the North of Brazil, this horrible ‘punishment’ was modified by substituting for the horses a couple of canoes to which the victim was bound. The canoes were paddled away from each other while the body was torn into two. The Government, as a means of raising funds for the building of churches would engage in ransoming of the Indians captured and brought from the backlands to the plantations in such conditions that only a third would survive. The service of the Indians was so indispensable for the colonists that they were unable to do anything without them. This was in the second century of colonization. The plantation–owner was a parasite on the Indians. Everything depended upon the slave whose good right arm was his/her only wealth. The colonists were bent upon getting as many such arms as possible because only these could help the owners acquire the wealth and prestige they so hankered after. But these hands could readily be rendered useless owing to the unhygienic effect of the new mode of life. The stationary and continuous labour and the diseases acquired through contact with the whites or through the forced or continuous adoption of their customs–diseases such as syphilis, small pox, dysentery etc–worked havoc on the primitive people. A document of 158517 records that there was no food available in the market since the inhabitants did not have slaves to plant and harvest their crops. Another document of 1580 suggests that a terrible epidemic of dysentery killed off thousands of captive Indians. Both the slave-holding system and the Christian missionary activity accentuated the racial divide. The Portuguese tendency to have slave labour, a policy imported from Portugal, found the American Indian an easy prey. The number of Indians possessed by a colonist, whether addressed as ‘pieces’ or ‘administradores’ or ‘help’ became an index of his power and social standing. With his Indians as his capital the owner installed himself on the land. Each ‘piece’ was 11

CHAPTER 1

equivalent to certain amount of money. Debts were paid, provisions were acquired with these pieces or by ‘ransoming’ them. Therefore, the natural economic policy was geared towards possession of slaves, that is Indians, human beings who could be exchanged like coins. It was also natural that the capital had to be renewed due to old age, sickness and failing health. Due to excessive oppression most of the Indians in the North East Brazil living in the coastal areas perished within the end of the sixteenth century. The indigenous people had to fell trees, transport timber to the ships, harvest crops, hunt and fish, defend the master against enemy tribes and foreign mercenaries, and guide explorers through the virgin jungle. The aborigines came to realize what was meant by servile labour. He/she was no longer the free savage that he/she had been in the early days of Portuguese colonization. He /she was not yet uprooted from their physical and moral environment–hunting, fishing, making war etc so far as the male members were concerned This uprooting came with an agrarian form of colonization. It came with monoculture, represented chiefly at this stage by sugar that exterminated the Indians. III

Every Brazilian carries with him or her the shadow of the aborigines or the black people. In everything that the Brazilian loves – music, speech, delight of the senses, gait, cradle songs – he/she bears the mark of that influence: of the female slave or nanny who rocked him/her to sleep, who sucked him/her, who fed him/her by mashing his /her food; the influence of the old woman who told the Brazilian child his/her first tale of ghost or ‘bicho’; the mulatto girl who relieved the white Brazilian of his/her bicho de pe (a type of flea that burrows beneath the skin of the feet); the mulatto girl who initiated the white adolescent boy into physical love; of the black boy who was the first playmate . The importance of the black in the aesthetic and economic life of Brazil is inestimable. It was greater along the agrarian seaboard. The contribution of the black people in the technical and artistic capability of the Brazilian is very high. The Mohammedan blacks who were brought to Brazil from Africa were deeply influenced by Islamic teachings. Their culture was superior to that of the natives. They were also superior culturally to many of the white Portuguese who had almost no education and who were semi-literate. The Male uprisings in Bahia in 1835 has been identified by experts18 as an outbreak or eruption of a more advanced culture sought to be trampled by another, and a less noble one. In the slave shed in Bahia in 1835, there were more literate people than those in the Big Houses. Brazilian society in its formative stage benefited from the best of African culture. While importing blacks to Brazil, the Portuguese colonialists had among others, the following needs and interests: lack of white women; technical skill for working on metals; capability to work in the sugar plantations etc. The slaves that came from more advanced areas of culture were active, creative and noble and kept their imprint in the formation of Brazil. If they occupied a lower rung in the social ladder, it was due to their condition as slaves. Far from being 12


merely draft animals and workers with the hoe, they fulfilled a civilizing function. They were the right hands in the formation of the Brazilian agrarian society. Their contribution was felt much beyond the realm of agriculture. They were masters in iron mining, cattle-raising, culinary art etc. Brazil not only took from Africa the topsoil of a black people that was to fertilise the cane fields, and coffee grounds, assuage its perched lands, and fetch the wealth afforded by the patches of massape. They also served as “mistresses of the house” for the colonists who were without white women. They were cloth and soap merchants, schoolmasters and priests for the praying Mohammedans. There were intimate connections between the Brazilian and African coasts. There exist interesting data regarding the trade between Bahia and the African cities of Lagos and Dahomey at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The trade was conducted by former slaves.19 The Sudanese people brought as slaves from Africa had a high degree of intellectual and social capability. Many revolts of the slaves, including the Bahian revolt of 1835, were connected to the Sudanese Mohammedans. As a result of this religious strand, Catholicism was infused with Islamic influence like animism and fetishism of the natives. This Islamic influence affected the Catholicism of the Big Houses though the padres were opposed to it. The padre school master worked hard to mitigate the corruption of the Portuguese language by the native and African dialects. The Mohammedan blacks of Brazil, once they had been distributed in the slave huts of the colonial Big Houses did not lose contact with Africa. They had constant touch, through various means with the advanced cultural areas of their native continent. They would import religious articles and objects of everyday use from their homeland: kola nuts, cloth, soap from the coast and oil from the dende palm. It is quite interesting to note that, down to the end of the 19th century, repatriation of Haussa and Nago free men and women from Bahia to Africa had taken place. It was these free men and women repatriated to Africa who founded the city of Porto Seguro. The relationship between Salvador and Dahomey was so close that heads of many commercial houses received honorary distinction from the Government of Dahomey.20 Often the influence of the black people in the Brazilian way of life is confused with the effect of slavery which deeply influenced the Brazilian social plastics. At times, what appears to be the influence of race is purely and simply that of the slave, of the social system of slavery, a reflection of the enormous capacity of the system for morally degrading both the masters and the slaves. The Brazilian black appears, throughout the Brazilian colonial life, as being deformed by slavery and the one-crop system. It is the habit that makes the monk; so it is true of the slave. The black person was often obliged to divest himself/herself of the male tunic and to don the ‘tanga’ of the filthy slave ships. He or she had to often put on a pair of sack cloth to become the bearer of ‘tigre’ or the fecal urn. Slavery uprooted the black from his/her social environment and turned him/her loose among a strange and hostile people. In such surroundings, in contact with forces so discordant in their effect, it would be absurd 13

CHAPTER 1

to expect of the slave any other deportment than that immoral kind of which he/ she has been so commonly accused. The effect of African diseases upon the physical constitution of the Brazilian people is often emphasized. It is therefore important to note that it was in Brazil that the blacks became syphilitic. The contamination occurred in the colonial slave quarters. It still now is the custom to blame the ‘inferior race’ for everything that the present day Brazilian finds to be a handicap. But it was from the superior race that the great veneral malady spread to the slave huts and brought havoc. The masters of the Big Houses infected the black women of the slave-huts. Very often the latter were virgins, girls of twelve or thirteen years. The principal causes of the abuse of the blacks by the whites are to be looked for in the economic and social conditions favourable to masochism which were created by the process of colonization by the Portuguese–with almost no women to begin with. This has also to be sought in the slave-hosting system with the all–powerful masters interacting with passive slaves; such factors explain those sadistic forms of love which still are prominent among the Brazilians. Through the old black women and nurses and nannies of children, African stories, – animals fraternizing with human beings, talking like them, marrying, feasting and so on – came to be added to the collection of Portuguese tales imported to Brazil. The language of the young likewise grew softer through contact of the child with the black wet nurse. Certain words that are hard or sharp-sounding when pronounced by the Portuguese are much softly pronounced in Brazil owing to the influence of the African palate. The climate is also another corruptor of the European tongue in tropical and sub-tropical Brazil.21 The black nurse very often treated words the way she prepared food: she mashed them, removed the bones, took away their hardness and left them as soft and pleasing as possible in the mouth of the white child. For this reason the Portuguese as spoken in the North of Brazil, is one of the most melodious forms of speech to be found, anywhere in the world, it is claimed.22 And it was not merely the language of children that was softened in this fashion, but the language of the adults too. The tongue, through the contact of the master with the slave, went through a softening process. Black mothers and slave girls, allies of the boys and girls as well as of the ladies of the Big Houses, created a Portuguese language that was different from the stiff and grammatical tongue that the Jesuits endeavored to teach to the young Indian and semi-white pupils in the schools. It was also attempted by the priestly school masters and plantation chaplains. All these efforts were in vain too. However, these attempts to preserve such linguistic rigidity enhanced the disparity between the written and spoken language in Brazil. There were even, for a time, two spoken languages: one of the Big Houses and the other of the slave huts. But the alliance of the black nurse and the white child, of the slave girl and the young mistress, of the young master and the slave boy combined to do away with this dichotomy. In Brazil, the African tongue without any motive for continuing a separate existence in opposition to the language of the whites, got dissolved in the latter, enriching it with expressive modes of speech and with delightfully picturesque terms that were 14


new and untamed in flavour. This colloidal mixture replaced Portuguese expressions that were worn and spoiled with usage. As soon as a child began to crawl in the big house, a slave about his / her own age and sex was given to it as playmate. They grew up together. The slave child was made the stock upon which the young one gave vent to passion. The slave child, as it grew up, was sent upon all kinds of errands and received the blame for all unfortunate accidents. In fact, the white child, thus, was encouraged to become overbearing. Sadist and masochist tendencies developed in the white and black adults respectively out of this relationship. It was true both for the males and the females. Like the male white child, the white girl child usually displayed a sadistic bent, owing to her fixity and monotony in the relationship between the mistress and the slave girl. Without contact with the outside world, with no other perspective than that of the slave-hut, as seen from the verandah of the Big Houses, these ladies preserved the same degree of domination over the housemaids as they exercised over the black girl children who were their playmates. Some experts claim23 that the mistress was more cruel than the master in her treatment of the helpless black maids. There are stories of mistresses who had the eyes of a pretty mucama gouged out and then served to their husband as dessert. There are tales of young baronesses of adult age who, out of jealousy or spite, had 15-year-old mulatto girls sold off to old libertines. There were others who had kicked out the teeth of their women slaves with their boots or who had their breasts cut-off, their nails drawn or their faces or ears burned. The motive was generally jealousy, sexual rancour and rivalry. In the schools of the colonial time, there used to be a certain laxity that was seen in the excesses, turbulence and perversions of the young; there was also a criminal abuse of childish weakness. The teachers took a real delight in humiliating the child, in doing him bodily violence. This was a reflection of a general tendency to sadism that developed in Brazil due to slavery and abuse of the blacks. The teacher was an all–powerful master. Looking down from his chair, which, after independence, became something very much like a royal throne, and with the imperial crown carved in relief on the back, he delivered punishment with the terrible air of a plantationowner giving a thrashing to his runaway blacks. The one who did not apply himself to the lessons as he should have was asked to stand with his arms spread apart; the one caught laughing aloud was humiliated by having a dunce-cap put on his head, to make him the laughing stock of the entire school; others would be forced to crawl on knees over grains of corn. There were also the ferrule and the rod, – the latter often, with a thorn or a pin stuck at the end of it – to permit the teacher to hurt a pupil from a distance.24 SECTION – 2 I

The rural patriarchy of Brazil began to lose its grandeur with the arrival of Dom Joao VI in Rio de Janeiro. The discovery of the gold mines in Minas Gerais was 15

CHAPTER 1

already hurling deathblows to these patriarchs. Brazil therefore ceased to be a land of brazilwood and sugar plantation from this time onward. The presence of a prince with royal powers and bourgeois tastes as well as those of the queen, court, nobles, soldiers, foreign diplomats, doctors, musicians etc. brought about many changes. The first secondary school, the first library and the first bank were established. These ushered in a profound change in the colonial society. These changes began to strengthen the power of the crown. Industrialists began to wield power in the urban centres. The crown began to interfere with the powers of the patriarchs. The erstwhile sugar barons and rural patriarchy revolted in 1720. This further strengthened the hands of the crown and helped centralise royal power. The independence of the planters, Paulistas, Mineiros, and the ranchers was curbed substantially with proportionate reduction in their arrogance. In Pernambuco, the lines were drawn up between the backwoods aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of the mansions of Recife. The bourgeoisie were now in collusion with the king and at odds with the plantation owners, their former allies. The higher echelons of the establishment were now allies of the aristocracy – the rural patriarchy. This redefinition of forces was evident in the Peddler’s War which ended in victory for the urban interests. This also led to a resurgence of urban life – commercial and industry. The Spanish and Dutch domination of Pernambuco during 1580–1654 further accentuated this bourgeois development. Recife, a simple fishing village around a church, developed into one of the finest cities of the colony, and one of the best cities in the entire continent during the Dutch rule. There were four-storey houses, royal palaces, bridges, canals, a zoological garden, an observatory, Calvinist churches, synagogues, etc. Foreigners of various nationalities mingled freely with local inhabitants. The city life reflected massive urbanisation. However, after 30 years of Dutch domination (1624–1654), the North returned to its agricultural and religious routine. The adventure of differentiation in language, culture and religious belief gradually waned and became a memory. Nevertheless, the time of the Flemings left in the Brazilian North, principally in the tenant farmer, a taste for the experience of something different from the drab monotony of life in the shadow of the Big Houses. The urban taste began to be felt by the inhabitants and visitors alike. Free mestizos, artisans and traders of European origin who composed a big chunk of the new urban population retained a taste for material well-being which was encouraged by the Flemings. The Flemings brought to this colony of backwoodsmen novelties of a magical world – the resources of the new industrial civilization and middle class values. Brazilian documents of the 18th century give evidence of the emergence of a new class thirsting for power25. The members of the middle class and the rich merchant community were bent upon destroying the monopoly of the privileged families of landowners in the legislative assemblies and senates. Adventurers who had struck it rich in the mines or had made it good in business converted themselves into ‘mansion merchants’. This new class was hungry for power. The planters and ranchers held this new class in contempt. However, culturally, still, the rural gentry held their sway. The greatest ambition of the trader and Portuguese immigrants of humble origin was to enter into the 16


ranks of the rural gentry – even if symbolically. Marriage was often the ladder by which many of these successful businessmen, of modest background, climbed up the ‘social ladder’. The social ascent of elements of the town mansions to the manor houses of large plantation owners became more frequent in the nineteenth century. This was due to the growing prestige of the city-dwellers. The emergence of a new brilliant section of society – lawyers and doctors, some of them sons of artisans and shopkeepers by black or mulatto women; the growing dependence of the plantation owners on their commission merchants and agents who dealt in the slave, sugar and coffee trades; the dependence of sugar farming on banks that provided credit; all these undermined the prestige of the landowners who were often in debt. The cities took away from the plantations their most illustrious sons, including those who opted for priesthood or a career in the military. The poor-endowed, or those having no desire to leave, succeeded in the majority of the cases in the management of rural properties which were shrinking in importance and size being divided up among distant heirs who were not interested in farming. This should not, however, give one the idea that the great landowners, so prosperous in the early days of colonisation, wound up as King Lears; that they were betrayed by their learned sons and daughters who deserted the Big Houses of the plantations; that they were betrayed by the King who was once their ally; that they were forsaken by the Church. The drama of the decay of their power, which at one time was almost absolute, is not that simple, nor the rise of the bourgeoisie was that swift. The farming pattern, rather monoculture, so destructive for the land, continued throughout the patriarchal period. This is true for Maranhao and Para in the North, Pernambuco and Bahia in the North-east as well as Minas Gerais, Rio and Sao Paulo. They planted only in the cleared forest since this involved minimum effort. Even during high market prices of sugar, the owners of lands and slaves showed little profit due to such lethargy. During the period under consideration, i.e. end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, the Brazilian society became consolidated around a strong government. The law courts became quite independent in their delivery of judgement. Even the clerical establishment showed a high degree of resilience. This period was also marked by more independence of the lesser beings. There was less domination of the son by the father, of the wife by the husband, of the individual by the family, of the slave by the owner. There was greater individualism of women, children, the blacks and indigenous persons. The English, with the help of local entrepreneurs, modernized the system of transportation. City services like lighting, road surfacing and sanitation improved. Life became freer from domestic drudgeries. The streets, once occupied only by the poor, including free black people, peddlers and street urchins, acquired status. Industrialization brought in its wake manufacturing. Factories were established for making soap, candle, and cloth. Cabinetmakers, hairdressers, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, dressmakers, cheese producers were setting themselves up in workshops, foundries and shops. Children went to schools and academies. It was a period of balance between the individual and the collective. The ability to imitate the foreigner and to assimilate their culture brought about an urbanity which was non-existent before. 17

CHAPTER 1

There was nostalgia for the past grandeur and glory; but there were also expectations of modernity. The city square gradually triumphed over the plantation. But it still respected and even maintained some of the idiosyncrasies of the plantation Big Houses. Brazilian patriarchy did not come to terms with the urban culture immediately. The rural Big House and the city mansion maintained distance from one another for quite sometime. Only gradually did the rural patriarchy come to terms with the ways of the town and the street. The woman remained indoors even in the city mansions. The stores sent to the mansions parasols, shoes, ribbons, ivory combs, hair ornaments, satins etc. The young ladies, imprisoned indoors, would purchase the items according to their desire and taste. They would only visit neighbours and friends occasionally in a covered carriage to show off their recent acquisitions. The peddlers often visited the city mansions to sell their merchandise – satins, ribbons, bottles of perfume, dresses. However, in the cities, the peddlers were shorn of the air of grandeur that they displayed in plantations in earlier times. Women first began to appear before strangers in Rio de Janeiro. But the rules slackened only gradually. The only women encountered in the streets were black and mulatto girls. Even men kept indoors. However, in Recife and Sao Luis de Maranhao, men spent their afternoons in the street. There, they flirted with the mulatto girls and discussed everything under the Sun seated on benches. It was almost an adventure to go out into the street after dusk. City streets used to be pitch black; the alleys narrow; there were mud puddles; chamber pots were emptied in the middle of the street; carcasses were strewn all around. In Bahia, Vila Roca and Olinda, a passer-by ran the risk of getting tipped and falling. The average town-dweller did not take sufficient exercises to remain fit. Confining themselves to the house, and remaining seated most of the time, they usually became victims of a state of fatal laziness. It was to avoid contact with the man in the street that the members of the nobility shunned contact with the outdoor. However, the city for all its shortcomings was showing improvements over the rural areas. Epidemics like small pox and other devastating diseases could be combated better in the cities. The city in alliance with the Church introduced in Brazil not only hospitals, asylums, orphanages etc. but also public medicine, scorned by the patriarchal families. The black slaves developed a sense of solidarity of race and class. Among the people of the so-called lower classes, there developed a cooperative association with a sense of ethnic brotherhood and militant defense of the rights of the worker. In this connection, it is worth mentioning the founding of Palmares by runway slaves in 1631. They fled the various plantations with weapons and tools to the interior of Alagoas. There they set up a ‘Republic’. Their capital was a fortified stronghold in a palm grove. From time to time they would raid some Dutch or Portuguese settlements. Their number grew gradually. It required the combined efforts of troops of several captaincies to destroy the settlement seventy-six years later. Some of the inhabitants committed suicide instead of returning to their former state of servitude. Palmares was a real attempt at independence based on the extension of a para-socialist type of culture. Historians claim that the inhabitants of Palmares stored crops in community granary, pooled in their resources in clearing 18


the land, on the ranches and at the mills. The same cooperation was seen in the street, in the market place, and in ensuring food supply among the inhabitants. A city of straw shacks arose by itself, amidst the forest, in opposition to the Big Houses and stone mansions. It was the first city to rise up against the plantation. Its technique of working the land was the fore-runner of the diversification of crops in contrast to the predominant monoculture of the white planters26. Another example of cooperation was shown by the slaves of Ouro Preto. Here, they systematically joined hands for securing slaves’ freedom. Led by a slave called Francisco, a large number of slaves in the mines of Ouro Preto bought their freedom with their work. First an elderly man would buy his freedom; then the son’s freedom would be bought. Later, father and son together would secure the freedom of the stranger. In this way, many bought their freedom and ultimately became owners of the Encardideira mines. The former slaves of Ouro Preto organised themselves even better than the white merchants and artisans into a brotherhood known as Saint Iphigenia. They built a church. There, on auspicious occasions, they celebrated with great merrymaking the festival which was more African than European. The main feature of the festival was dance which they did to the sound of African beats. They danced in the street in front of their Church. It was religion which provided them with a holiday air and excitement on the streets of the old cities of Brazil. The rich came from the plantations and ranches to accompany the processions. The fronts of the houses used to be whitewashed and adorned with draperies. The brotherhood paraded through the streets strewn with sands and leaves; the spaces between houses were adorned with hangings brought from India. The Governor, the bishop, state officials, all participated in the procession. Some of the ladies used to be dressed fashionably, others in antiquated garments. At times, a black man would slash himself or be slashed by razors by others – some would hold his intestines, carrying the body and its parts in a hammock. The processions with bands of music were the meeting place of the Capoieras. Their counterparts were the hired gunmen of the plantations. Music flourished in the city mansions. In 1850, anyone passing through the streets of Rio de Janeiro would have heard, instead of the sound of the guitar and harp, pianos played by the young ladies of the Big Houses for the exclusive enjoyment of the whites of the upper class27. The contact with English fashions increased after the arrival of Dom Joao VI and exerted a marked influence on the customs and domestic architecture of Brazil. The influence was more pronounced in Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio before it made itself felt in Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. What attracted the foreigners was the wealth of the plantation aristocracy enriched by sugar. In the second part of the 19th century, coffee took predominance over sugar. Then the houses of the North lagged behind in comfort and opulence from those of the South. The streets were becoming more elegant. However, the distance remained between the street and the house. The newspapers regularly carried advertisements for sale of black girls and boys. The Diario do Rio de Janeiro of January 28, 1821 carried an advertisement 19

CHAPTER 1

for the sale of a black girl brought up in a mansion. There were advertisements that highlighted the ability of the slave to sell merchandise on the street. The relative ease of life in the sugar-growing region, already affected by the discovery of gold, declined still further with the initiation of coffee plantation. In the cities, the mansions owned by the planters degenerated into barns. Rats, bats and ghosts were taking over the neglected houses. The bank rules became steadily more stringent for the planters, while prices of slaves skyrocketed. Interest rates rose so high that the sugar plantations were threatened by paralysis and death. The ranches of the South began to absorb the slaves of the North. They were left without slaves. II

The prestige of the matured person was so great in the Brazilian patriarchal society that the child, ashamed of being a child, tended to ripen prematurely. He took pride in a precocity, which relieved him of the humiliation of being a child. Because of the prestige claimed by advanced age, the youth imitated middle-aged men. They attempted to conceal behind bushy whiskers and glasses or at least by a stern expression, all the glow of the youth, the joy of adolescence. Up to a certain age, the child was idealized. He was identified with angels, going about naked in the house like infant Jesus. If the child died at an angelic age, it became an object of adoration. But the adoration of the child antedated his reaching the age of reason. Within his 10th year, he turned into a child devil. He neither ate at the table nor shared in any way in the conversation of the grown-ups. He was a superfluous being. Since the adolescent was looked as an alien being, sinful by nature, of a lazy wicked bent, he was punished severely. The white boy was punished by his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, in short, all the elders of the household. Such punishment came from adults in whom the habit of absolute command, as well as responsibility, over the slave had developed into an inclination to mistreat children. This system of the Big House continued in a slightly attenuated form, in the big mansions in the cities. In patriarchal Brazil, the authority of the father over the minor son – even one who was of age – was carried to its logical conclusion: the right to kill. The administration of justice by the patriarch to the members of his own family members, even in matters of imparting education of their children, took at times sadistic character. This sadism was only slightly modified when the patriarchal system of the Big Houses was transmitted to the city mansion28. With the decay of the rural patriarchy, the sadistic pedagogy, exercised at home by the patriarch, the tutor, the chaplain, got a terrible lease of life in the religious and state schools. The parents delegated to the teachers and priests the authority to punish. If the child did not behave of his own accord, he was made to do so by every means, even the most cruel. Men who from their infancy suffered like slaves at the hands of those in authority became stammerers as a result of the despotism of their fathers and tutors. 20


The religious school, occupying a huge building, is one of the landmarks of Brazil’s social landscape. It points to the decadence of the all-powerful patriarchy of the Big Houses. During the first century of colonization, the Jesuit school, in cities like Salvador, was already in competition with the plantation houses and the city mansions, in extending its authority over children, women and slaves. The education system of the Jesuits employed the same method of domination. They employed the same determination to break down the individuality of the child with a view to making him a passive and submissive adult. The barracks of stone and cement, in which the Jesuits started their first schools, produced the first educated men of Brazil. These people were to become the first university graduates, the first magistrates, priests, judges – men of the city rather than of the country. The literary culture, which made its precocious appearance in colonial Brazil, is indebted to them. The organisers or consolidators of civil and intellectual life, the revolutionaries of Bahia and Vila Roca, the poets, orators, writers of colonial days had nearly all studied with the Jesuits. The desire for a Bachelor’s degree awoke early in the Brazilian youth. The judge’s robe gave a nobility of its own to the pale adolescent who graduated from the Jesuit’s school. They preceded the University graduates of the nineteenth century who brought about abolition of slavery and proclamation of the republic. All the precocious and melancholy learning emphasized once more the fact that the Jesuits had imposed its discipline and manners on the more intelligent of the colonists and the little ones wrested from the Indian settlements by stern discipline and a policy of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, a tradition that remained in force in the religious schools until the end of the nineteenth century. The Jesuits of the 16th century gave exaggerated importance to the intelligent child with a literary bent, metamorphosing him into an almost sacred being in the eyes of the elders. They, i.e. the elders were filled with admiration for their sons who were so brilliant, gifted and superior to them in attainments. This status was achieved by sacrificing the child’s childhood, stifling his spontaneity, drying up the well spring of his youth. Other religious orders, taking a leaf from the Jesuits, started teaching of young people and charted out even a gloomier output. The seminaries and Jesuit schools, which operated in Brazil during the most difficult times when the society stood quite fragmented, had a great effect in the integration of Brazilian society. During these centuries of settlement, there were uprisings, revolts, petty interest of the family and private property getting preponderance over general well-being. One of the powerful factors in that integration was the influence of those schools upon the sons of the rich and the young mestizos, and through them on the more refractory social and cultural elements of the population. Students who studied in these schools brought an element of civility and universality to a society powerfully influenced by the aristocrats of the Big Houses and the patriarchal mansions in the cities. In their attire and mode of living they represented a growing tendency towards the prevalence of European ideas. The influence of the religious schools and the teaching of the chaplains, resident priests and other teachers and educators restrained the marked differentiation between 21

CHAPTER 1

the language of Brazil and Portugal. The differentiation took an alarming proportion in the agrarian zones. There the black slave lived in the house as a member of the family. Even a century ago, members of some illustrious plantation families could be identified by special defects of pronunciation which they picked up from their black house-servants. In some regions, the manner of speaking is even now characterised by a peculiar intonation. The priest tutor was almost a purist, aiming at the language of the Big Houses or city mansions which should not have a trace of the speech of the black – uncontaminated by the slave quarters and the shanties. The religious schools aimed, too, at unifying, mobilizing and Europeanizing the Brazilian upper class. In the closing days of the colony, Portuguese rulers, in open conflict with the legislative bodies, plantation owners, and other powers that be, sent out as governors young men not more than 30 years of age. This jolted the prestige of the elders. It was during Pedro II’s reign that the practice became manifest and young men systematically began occupying posts reserved for the elderly. With the social and political rise of the young men, respect for age, which until the beginning of the 19th century had been almost a religious cult, began to wane. This was the beginning of the decline of paternalism, which saw the grandfathers being discredited. It was the beginning of the emancipation of the child from the tyranny of the adult, of the student from the tyranny of the teacher. III

In the patriarchal regime, woman was made as different as possible from man. He was strong, she was weak. He was noble, she was beautiful. She was delicate, soft, motherly – without a trace of masculine vigour and ability. The reason for preferring such type of women was perhaps the desire to eliminate all competition posed by women for the economic and political control wielded by men. Evidently, there was a dual standard of morality – one for the man and another for the woman. Men were allowed every opportunity for having social intercourse, and contacts of all sorts. However, women were confined only to domestic duties. The system imprisoned women while liberating men. The ‘typecasting’ of woman in the role of a frail, neurotic, sexual, religious, romantic being was largely due to economic, social and cultural factors which sought to repress and deform women, widening her hips, narrowing her waist and rounding her figure in keeping with the taste of the dominating sex29. The sexual division of labour found in the so-called civilized societies – where domestic activities were performed by women and extra-domestic activities by men – was not existent in the amerindian societies which the Portuguese encountered in Brazil. There, the activities performed by women were not limited to domestics alone. In the primitive societies, there is a resemblance between man and woman; a tendency of the two sexes to become integrated in a single figure. The Botocudos, a primitive tribe inhabiting the eastern part of Brazil, did not have exclusive men and women but men-women and women-men30. There are tribes not only in Brazil but elsewhere in the world, where domestic labours are performed by men and 22


extra-domestic tasks by women. The women in these societies are lean and angular and men are fat, voluptuous and curved. Under a system in which one sex is dominated by the other, this tendency toward the single or common type of woman-man and man-woman which is so characteristic of primitive society, disappears. The difference between the sexes is so accentuated in a patriarchal system that it is shameful for man to resemble woman and vice-versa. A whole body of facts justifies us in deducing that the artificiality or unhealthiness of the fragile or languid type of women created by the patriarchal system in Brazil gave rise to not only an exaggerated code of etiquette but, as experts suggest, a profoundly erotic culture. The portrait of the woman, reflected in this etiquette and culture, if examined, will reveal that there exists a Narcissism on the part of the dominant sex, the man. He approaches this soft, delicate creature pretending to adore her, but in reality to assert himself. The women in the patriarchal era in Brazil, especially those living in city mansions, took great pains to attire themselves when they appeared before men on festive occasions or in the church. The woman sought to express her difference not only from the opposite sex but also from women of other classes and races. It used to be reflected in her excessive adornments, laces, feathers, ribbons and jewelry. The crafts, before they became industrialized around the middle of the 19th century, were mostly domestic crafts of the ladies of the Big Houses and city mansions. Social psychologists suggest that idleness stimulates eroticism in women. In man’s absence, this eroticism finds sublimation in self-adornment31. In Bahia, during the first half of the 19th century, the coloured women, for the most part, had their hair cut short and covered with a turban. To an outsider, this appeared to be a manifestation of cleanliness. The hair of women hailing from aristocratic families used to be full of lice. However, they would let their hair grow as long as possible as a mark of their social standing. Some native-born black and mestizo women also let their hair grow in an attempt to imitate the aristocratic ladies. One traveller in the middle of the 19th century saw many Africans living in Belem do Para. Some of these were slaves of the fine city residences and the nearby estates. Some were free too. Those free could be distinguished by their shoes which they alone had the right to wear and which they never failed to display proudly32. Even men in patriarchal Brazil used to be highly ornamented when as lord of the manor and master they appeared in the street or at some celebration. The super adornment of the rich city dweller consisted in the use of charms attached to his watch chain, of rings on most of his fingers, of gold-headed canes and sunshades and at times daggers, of fancy hair-cuts and whiskers, of perfume on his body. The blacks or slaves of either sex were forbidden the use of gold jewelry or charms. The female home-slaves who went well-dressed and covered in jewels were seen as alter-egos of their white mistresses. In studying the political and literary history of Brazil during the patriarchal phase it was revealed that the majority of the members of the ruling class were inclined to favour a subjective, superficial approach. Simultaneously, they had a marked lack of interest in concrete, immediate and local problems. This almost 23

CHAPTER 1

total lack of objectivity may partially be attributed to the slight or the non-existent part played by women in artistic and political activities. Brazilian politics, literature, education and social welfare suffered from the lack of a feminine touch during the splendor and decline of the patriarchal system. Only slowly, emerged the enlightened woman. In the later part of the 19th century appeared Narcisa Amalia in the realm of letters. Then a Carmen Dolores. And still later, a Julia Lopes de Almeida. Nigia Floresta’s appearance was a startling exception. A Brazilian woman of the mid19th century, she distinguished herself for her intellectual attainments. She lived in Europe for sometime when she befriended Auguste Comte. Recife, in 1848, made preparations to hold a grand masked ball. It was encouraged by the newspaper ‘Diario de Pernambuco’ which wrote in an article on February 18, “Pernambuco, whose capital rivals the imperial court in luxury and refinement, should not remain the victim of the prejudices of the eighteenth century, when the windows were covered with close-woven blinds. Our doors with screens.…”33 Accordingly a great pavilion was built in Recife which resembled a pagoda. There the masked ball was held. A huge edifice stood with rows of chairs on the right for the ladies and on the left for the gentlemen. Only those who wore mask were allowed to dance. The mask was considered sacred. Intoxicating liquors were absent. This refined, fashionable, silent carnival, with its silken elegance existed along with the other common, noisy, plebian celebration, with its opportunity for the young to give free rein to their youth, the blacks to their Africanism, and slaves and children to shout, dance and be merry. The society was so full of oppression, repression and overprotection of women that the carnival served as an outlet to men and women, children, blacks and indigenous people alike. The masked balls gave these people much psychological relief. It also lowered the social barriers for a part of the population who were bound on weekdays by strict norms of behaviours which could be transgressed on the weekends and festive days. In the semi-patriarchal life of the mansion–dwellers, the social positions of many a well-born young lady were broadened through a variety of contacts beyond the four walls. There arose many opportunities – theater, the open window, classes in dancing, music, and French etc. However, the avenues to take part in extra-domestic activities were minimal even in the urbanized regions in the first half of the nineteenth century. The absolutism of the paterfamilias in Brazil began to fade as other masculine figures gained prestige in the slave-based society: doctors, priests, directors of schools, provincial presidents, chiefs of police, judges, business agents, to name a few. Institutions grew up around the Big House, diminishing its importance and overshadowing it. With the emergence of these figures and institutions, women, in turn, began to free themselves from the excessive patriarchal authority. Together with the children and the slaves, they achieved a higher juridical and moral status. There also took place marriages of the wealthy white girl, the daughter of the planter or a city magnate with the poor university graduate, sometimes a mulatto or the solider of lower social strata. 24


The Church, which had fought so tenaciously to exercise authority over the family through the Jesuits in the first century, was forced to capitulate in the second. Later, it recovered certain of its supposed rights and part of the spiritual and moral prestige it had lost as a result of complete surrender of the family chaplain to the paterfamilias. The newly gained authority contributed to the decline of the patriarchy of the plantation house and the city mansion. Early in the 18th century, in spite of large numbers of unmarried men in the captaincy of Minas Gerais, many girls were forced by their tyrannical fathers to enter a convent where some of them pined their days away in virginity. Some fathers wanted the honour of having a daughter as a nun. Others wanted to avoid the fate of selecting a son-in-law from among men whose whiteness might be open to doubt. One patriarch was reported to have stabbed to death his own daughter, suspecting that she was having an affair with a young man of low-extraction34. IV

The house is one of the most powerful social forces of human experience. The Brazilian patriarchal system frowned upon the street since it represented contact with the outside world. However, contacts began to be made as the city grew, but the system endevaoured to segregate the house from the outside influences. But it resulted only in a limited success. The Big Houses in the sugar plantations were highly insular. Certain extreme features of this isolation were corrected in the city mansion. Since the towns and cities grew up without plan, out of necessity, the growth was spontaneous and haphazard. There used to be narrow, cramped houses, filled to overflowing with people. As early as 1640, people arriving from Europe had nowhere to stay. Some important people wanted to build houses for the common folk – especially for the new arrivals. But more influential people bought up land in areas slated for development. The rents of houses and rooms reached unbelievable figures. With the richer burghers moving out to houses that were in the outskirts of the city, the central portion became the business centre as well as the living area of minor government officials, employees of the West Indies company, artisans, workmen, soldiers, sailors and prostitutes. They lived in the most deplorable and unhygienic conditions. This happened noticeably with the growth of the city of Recife. Recife, with its tenements and houses of ill-fame, was one of the main centres of syphilis in Brazil. The port prostitutes were the principal spreaders of the disease. Not only black, mulatto or half-bred women but also Dutch blond women (during the Dutch occupation) excited the desire of the city bred. New Holland was the first attempt at urbanisation in Brazil. There the mansions were more numerous than the modest houses or shanties. The province of Pernambuco provides the perfect example for study of the influences of two types of colonization – the urban and the rural, the Dutch and the Portuguese. The Dutch were centred around the city mansion with houses resembling tenements 25

CHAPTER 1

growing around it. The Portuguese plan was based on the Big Houses of the plantation surrounded by slave quarters. The urban life was not much superior to the rural life. There were cases of unfaithful men and women. The women were severely punished for such offences. There were numerous instances of bigamy. Diseases like dysentery and influenza, due to polluted water, were common both in the mansion and in the shanty. The city of Recife was a veritable hell due to sexual aberrations. Even priests were suspended from the order for taking advantage of confessionals to seduce young penitents. Drinking was another vice which took on alarming proportions in Recife during the Dutch occupation – probably because of the greater predisposition of the people of the North towards alcohol. However, this observation should not be generalised as the common people did not have the money to buy even a cassava or a manioc meal. There was an imbalance between the urban population and the availability of foodstuffs – mainly due to monoculture. The imbalance accentuated due to the gold fever in the 17th century. The mining cities grew up in size, with the poorest among the population suffering from lack of adequate supply of foodstuff and high prices. The lucky adventurers who found gold rose in the social scale, becoming planters and owners of city mansions. They butchered their hogs and turkeys and fattened their dairy cows. The rest of the population continued with the minimum of nourishment. The army officers shamelessly cornered the meat market in the North and grew rich at the expense of the poor. The speculators in food stuff in Minas Gerais were the friars. With growing urbanisation, the situation became worse. The soaring cost of meat, vegetable and milk alarmed the economists of the day. Some of them diagnosed that the problem was created due to reduced production and growing demand. Some attributed the crisis to the shortage of labour due to tapering-off of the slave-trade as well as the high mortality among the slaves. Some held the opinion that the root cause was an overriding concentration of labour in the cultivation of the export product to the neglect of home-consumption. It was precisely in the large monocultural provinces that the cost of living skyrocketed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Pernambuco and Bahia were devoted to the production of sugar. Rio de Janeiro and Sau Paulo concentrated on coffee. The agricultural products consumed in cities like Rio, Recife, Salvador or Sao Paulo were supplied by the provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso, Piaui etc. Some products were imported – tea, cheese, wine, oil etc. Europe supplied salted codfish. Meat came from Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Prices increased further at the hands of speculators. The shanty dwellers rarely ate any meat or fish in the monocultural provinces. Chronic ulcer and night blindness assumed endemic proportion among the slaves and city poor. Women suffered from miscarriages. The black slaves of the coffee plantation had to gather coffee at night, even during the rainy season. Excessive work, an insufficient diet, rigorous punishments made the slaves suffer. These miserable beings were veritable money-making machines. The coffee boom represented transition from a patriarchal to an industrial 26


economy. The mortality rate among the workers was alarming. A slave was bought with the idea of utilizing him for a year. During this period, which often extinguished the slave’s life, he was forced to do enough work to repay his master’s initial investment and also gave profit to the owner. The planters who bought one hundred slaves calculated that by the end of three years only twenty-five would be still alive. Black and mulatto slaves used to run away from the coffee plantations. In the cities they worked as tinsmith, cabinetmaker, blacksmith etc. and gained professional and social advancement. Attractive mulatto and black women became mistresses of the recently migrated Portuguese or Italians. These women worked as laundresses, vendors and in other similar professions. A few ended up as the wives of the new masters. Others, who were not so fortunate, ended up as ruffians, thieves and prostitutes. The newly arrived immigrants from Europe, belonging to the working class section, lived in homes which were worse than the shanties. These houses were low, small and with a minimum number of windows. Often these had no floors. Only a roof protected from sun and rain. There were others, which were made of clay with a tin roof and a floor of only bare earth. These places were terribly crowded too. Compared to these tenements, many shanties were better. These had a roof of two or three layers of sape grass, like what the primitive Indians built. The roof afforded protection and comfort. With growing urbanisation, the lower classes began to be housed in tenements. It started in Dutch Recife. These were built on the river-fronts. In Rio and Olinda, the poor lived in the houses built on the foot of the hills. The wealthy, Jesuits and friars quickly took possession of the hills to build their mansions, churches and convents. To the poor were left the stinking mudholes, mangrove swamps and marshes. Shanties and shacks sprang up in the low, foul parts of the city. As the swamps and marshes got filled up, the rich began to come down from the hills to take possession of the lower parts of the city as well. The poverty visible in the making of the shanty, still seen in Brazil over large areas, is not due to any lack of building materials. The poverty of the great masses of the Brazilian population compounded with the mobility with which many of them moved from one place to another in search of livelihood, do explain the construction of these hovels. The land in urban Brazil was so heavily concentrated in the hands of a microscopic minority that millions of Brazilians did not possess even a square foot of land. Only a few thousand owners of factories, ranches, rubber plantations, coffee-groves and cane-fields controlled the whole of Brazil. They were also the owners of tenements, settlements and hovels. Salvador preserved in the 17th and 18th centuries the rustic air of the countryside. There were charming gardens between houses. Woods existed within the city. The mansions of the wealthy rivaled those of the plantations in terms of expanse of the buildings and space given over to cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The mansions had everything, including black slaves imported directly from Africa, Europe or the Canary Island. The cities therefore spread out enormously to accommodate the woods, gardens, sea, slave-quarters, warehouses, coffee bushes, virgin 27

CHAPTER 1

forests etc. The topography of the cities like Recife did not allow horizontal expansion. These urbanised vertically. It was in Recife that the unique urban architecture of buildings first appeared. Houses rose up to six-storeys and these were owned by the wealthiest few. The cleanliness of the houses and their inhabitants sharply contrasted with that of the city. The cleaning of the streets, yards, beaches and roofs was left to the vultures or the tides. The beaches below the walls of the city residences of Rio, Salvador and Recife were places where no one could walk, let alone bathe. The garbage used to be dumped there. Barrels of excrements, litter and the refuse of the houses and streets were emptied on the beach. Dead animals and murdered slaves were thrown there. The sea was synonymous with filth. The river, on the contrary, was a noble place. People bathed in the river in the morning and rowed canoes or boats in the afternoon35. The shanties preserved over the years the primitivism of the early days of colonisation. They were the refuge of the mestizos, of the run-away slaves and of the free black. These also housed the whites who had become socially integrated with the half-breeds and the blacks. For many blacks and mulattos, eager for freedom, the shanty was preferable to the slave-quarters made of stone and mortar. The slavequarters were also in reality shanties, each cabin being about 12 sq. ft. or smaller and without even a single window. There were huts of straw standing in the swamps especially near the places where the black slaves used to disembark from the ships. These were, perhaps, the first slums of Brazil erected on muddy grounds or mangrove swamps, land that was good for nothing and uninhabitable. In other shanties, built on other swamps, the poorest section of the free inhabitants of the city of Rio took refuge, that which would later build its miserable favelas, on the hills. V

Brazil’s patriarchal society began to show degeneration as the slave-labour monoculture no longer remained sustainable. This was the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many slave owners had to feed themselves on the earnings of the slaves. A large majority of the plantation owners became quite restless. Some even wanted a democratic order whereby they would be able to get rid of their creditors. Most of the plantation-owners were in a precarious situation. Many who were born rich found themselves as poor in their old age. By the end of the 18th century, the planters who lacked the means to substitute the slaves and animals with machinery or tools, neglected the labour force at their command. The slaves flogged and fed on a miserable diet began to die in large numbers. The city began to flourish. In the middle-class residences luxury reached heights rarely attained by the Big Houses of the plantations. Some of the wealthiest planters of Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco converted their city houses into mansions. Big businessmen, their agents and brokers were masters of equally sumptuous houses. 28


The prejudice against the traders was no longer felt so strongly by the planters as they competed with each other in extravaganza. From the beginning of the 18th century, the monarchs of Portugal had been conferring prestige on the peddlers to counteract the excess of economic and political power acquired by the planters. By the beginning of the 19th century, the Brazilian Press began to glorify the image of the merchant, the industrialist, the artisan. By the second decade of the 19th century, many persons in Rio de Janeiro felt that the national industry should be further stimulated. It was being ardently desired that machines and models that would bring about freedom from foreign technical supremacy should be encouraged. Industrialists and businessmen began to be conferred titles of nobility by the king. Many who started their career as mere clerks were now respectable citizens in the era of transition. As was expected in a patriarchal society, those who excelled in business or commerce or in industry often assumed titles of ‘colonel’, ‘field marshal’ or ‘brigadier’, thus imitating the rural patriarchs or urban nobility. Successful clerks in time became barons, viscounts or grandees. Tradesmen, manufacturers and even highly skilled craftsmen came to be outwardly identified with the nobility. They possessed huge mansions, fine carriages, resplendent uniforms and glittering decorations. It was possible for the half-breeds, mestizos and coloured persons to rise to the social position of the whites. The attitude of the nobility towards commercial enterprises underwent a change. The prejudices against trade and commerce were becoming modified. Some of the nobles got themselves involved in manufacturing. However, the importation of slaves continued unabated though industry, trade and commerce were flourishing. The intellectually advanced members of the rural gentry accepted industry, craft, and even trade without giving up the system of slave labour. Hoe and slaves continued to be employed in place of farm implements and machinery as late as the eighteenth century. Transportation was carried out by river. For overland, the oxcart was the only option. Yet, in spite of the edict of 1785, which forbade creation of factories, rice-hulling units, cotton gins, sugar mills, distilleries etc. were being established and operated exclusively by slaves. In the social plane, free blacks and mulattos imitated the dress of the wealthy whites. While trying to free themselves from the past, the newly liberated slaves imitated their former masters in dress, gestures and postures. Nothing made a former slave or his son so happy as to put on the frock-coat of a doctor or the uniform of the National Guard. Private diaries of many a famous black or mulatto officers will testify how much they suffered when they were mocked in the street for wearing the uniform of an officer of the National Guard. The black woman who sported the French hat, instead of the turban, received the same ridicule. The villages of shacks, huts or shanties which grew up in the cities under the Empire resembled the African style of living which the former slaves wanted to reproduce. Some of these villages took on aspects of organisation of the African tribal families with ‘fathers’, ‘uncles’ or ‘foster fathers’ in supra-family communities or ‘republics’. The traditional phrase among the free blacks when they moved from the slave-quarters to the shanties is meaningful: ‘Now I am going to have a window 29

CHAPTER 1

and a back door’. It was complete negation of the typical slave quarters which had neither a front window nor a back door, reduced in effect being a prison cell. VI

During three centuries of relative isolation, emerged the typical Brazilian – the master and the slave. There also developed an intermediate species – the mulatto. He was coming out into university graduates, or a priest, or a doctor, etc. He had his academic diploma or appointment as captain of the militia. These were his certificates for whiteness. A weak middle-class was bourgeoning. Observed carefully, many Asiatic, Moorish or African characteristics could be discerned. The houses definitely had Asiatic characteristics – the roofs, balconies. The mode of transportations – palanquins or litters were similar to those in use in Asia. The feminine habit of sitting cross-legged on mats and carpets were Asiatic too. Painted tiles on the front of the houses, fountains and wells were Moorish. The table china came from India and Macao. The Portuguese colony of America had taken on qualities and conditions of life which were quite exotic. Over 300 years Europe had changed beyond recognition – industrial, commercial, mechanised, a triumph of the middle class. But then the reconquest of Brazil by Europe commenced. It continues; however, with an essential difference – the new European is a citizen of the USA. Asian, African or indigenous elements bequeathed a colorfulness which was tropical. The houses, palanquins, women’s shawls had bright colours. So was the interior of churches. Red, gold and scarlet were frequently used. Furniture were painted red or white. The Oriental tone began to fade in contact with Europe. Black, brown, gray and navy blue replaced red, gold, scarlet and white. With European influence the dress of the Brazilians and especially children began to show marked changes. The entire upbringing of children was re-Europeanized as Brazil came into contact with the ideas and fashions of England and France. Life became artificial. It stifled the senses and deprived the eyes of the taste for the pure and natural. However, also came in its wake the ideas of Europe. The patriarchs and clerics had dried up this source. Like monoculture which laid waste the physical landscape, the Jesuit schools laid waste the intellectual landscape. Lost were the relationships between human life and nature, the curiosity of learning, the pleasure of knowing, the joy of the adventure of the mind, and the unravelling of nature through scientific explorations. These forgotten desires, pleasures and adventures were transmitted to the Brazilians toward the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries by the French and Anglo-American revolutionaries and idealists. The French and English teachers and the Encyclopeadists instilled among the Brazilians a sort of liberalism and opened to them new zones of sensibility and culture, restored, to an extent, their intellectual spontaneity and the ability of discriminating, criticizing and creating. The Jesuits had created small elites of scholars to whom the reading of Latin was the only reading that was considered worthwhile. Anyone reading a story or a novel in the vernacular felt the mistrustful eye of the Inquisition upon him. 30


The only intellectual pleasure of the Bachelors or Masters of Arts educated by the Jesuits was to read and learn by heart the old Latin poets. The teaching of Greek never acquired the same importance as that of Latin. The Franciscan friars established in 1772 in Rio the first institution, which could be called a University. They included Hebrew and Greek in their curriculum. The official study of French and English dates from the same period. The study of modern European languages revolutionized the life of the Brazilians. Study of French helped the Brazilians to come in contact with the revolutionary ideas of the French Revolution. The various revolts in Minas Gerais and Pernambuco in the early 19th century owe their inspiration to these ideas. French books were in great demand by the beginning of the 19th century. The North-easterners, however, had the opportunity to hear various tongues and speak many a languages when Recife was occupied by the Dutch.Dutch was then taught in the schools created for the indigenous people by the Calvinist pastors and missionaries. Thus the Northeast was first exposed to the ideas of the world. Bahia became the first centre of medicine in Brazil. Dutch-Jewish Recife became an important centre of intellectual differentiation. Under Count Maurice of Nassau, in a grove of cashew trees, the first observatory of the Americas was built. A botanical and a zoological museum were also constructed. The Catholic monopoly was broken here. In Dutch Recife, as already noted, grew up a multiculturalism as the French, Dutch and Germans, Christians and Jews, blacks, mulattos and mestizos, Catholics and Protestants intermingled with each other over a period of thirty years. In the streets one could hear several of the African languages. Hebrew used to be taught in the synagogues. The Dutch domination was an epoch of transculturation. The influence of the Sephardic culture and Jewish trade, developed a kind of cosmopolitanism which was not visible in other parts of colonial Brazil. With the decline of the slave-based economy, a middle class culture became relatively important as foreigners began to come as craftsmen, dressmakers, doctors, midwives, dancing and language teachers, governesses, workers, builders, masons, cabinetmakers, carpenters, farm workers and small farmers. VII

The patriarchal Brazilian society was basically divided into two distinct classes – the rulers and the ruled. The rulers included the white European invaders and their descendants. The ruled, who were utilized as instruments of production, were natives and Africans and their descendants, pure and mixed. Thus on one side of the social divide remained the masters and on the other, the slaves. Sometimes, between the two, remained the products of miscegenation. This brought about the shifting of individuals and even whole families from one class to another, from one race to another, regardless of biological or even cultural differentiations36. The sociological study of Brazil reveals a process of initiation, flowering and decay of the patriarchal form of family organisation, economy and culture. The amalgamation of races and cultures acted as a solvent of the system of relations 31

CHAPTER 1

between people. This amalgamation of race and class did not bring about violence. The tendency, as claimed by experts, was towards interpenetration. This resulted in a slow democratization of the archaic system. This process of democratization gave rise first to subjects and then citizens37. The transfer of individuals and even whole groups, from one social level to another, became one of the strongest stimuli to the development of the so-called individual forms. This weakened the patriarchal structure each passing day. Among the Brazilians of the countryside, there were the indigenous people and even mestizos, who lived around a catholic church presided over by a Portuguese priest. They dressed and spoke like the Portuguese. They retained the indigenous method of building their dwellings, the use of hammocks for sleeping, clay cooking utensils and two-string bows. They ate manioc. Their greatest ambition was to be looked upon as Portuguese. From this desire, they even hated their own indigenous brethren, whom they called tapuias38. These people were not to be confused either with the slaves or the tenant farmers. The paternalism of the missionaries had not prepared them for a full life as subjects. And they were not subjects of the land-holding masters. Theirs was a special status – almost as that of free individuals. What they lacked was the initiative to assert for their rights. Their submission to the vicar or priest was spiritual. The colonialists did not care for the cultural differentiation that existed among various groups of the indigenous population. The patriarch lumped them together with the black slaves. However, they enjoyed certain rights which were forbidden for the blacks. They could ride horses and go out hunting in the jungle with dogs. They could also smoke tobacco. The blacks could neither ride horses, nor hunt with dogs nor smoke. The war against the Dutch provided an opportunity to the blacks in the North to rise to the rank of the nobility through military service. The conflict between the trading class in Recife who had emigrated from Portugal and the planters of Olinda took the shape of a veritable civil war. In this part of Brazil where Portuguese colonisation struck deep root, the distinction of colour and class was clearly marked. The Brazilian social ecology always reserved the work of menial labour as something distinct from the job of a gentleman – the former being reserved for the black slave or ex-slave. This tradition continued during the republic down to the present age39. Brazilian social formation reveals varying predominant elements depending upon the complex of religion, class and race: the whites in relation to the coloured; the owner of a plantation or ranches in relation to poverty-stricken tenants; the masters in relations to the slaves; the old Christian in relation to the new Christian; the native-born Brazilian in relation to the Portuguese or the naturalised Brazilian; the inhabitants of the Europeanized seaboard in relation to the remote interiors. In spite of such inversion or confusion, there were some features in the Brazilian culture, which were preserved as characteristics or peculiarities of class, race or region. St. Benedict, thus, was a saint of the blacks, St. Onofre was the saint of the poor. Samba was for a long time a dance of the slaves and the blacks; The disdain of the progressive Brazilian for the straw-thatched hut or shanty was for a large 32


measure his association for centuries with a class, race or region looked upon as inferior. No backwoods man was allowed to come to the city trotting or gallopping. Those who would do so would be fined 30 milreis if they were freemen and receive three dozen lashes if they were slaves. Among the ordinances of the city council of Recife, the following is noteworthy: Ordinance promulgated on December 10, 1831 by which the blacks were forbidden “to shout”, scream or cry out in the street – a restriction directed against the Africans and their religious processions. Black porters were forbidden to go about the streets “between nightfall and sun up”. No black slave could go about in the city of Recife by day or night, with a dagger or any arms, visible or hidden, under penalty of suffering 50 to 100 lashes in prison depending on the type of arms. Those games were forbidden “in streets, squares, beaches or stairs, which negroes and vagabonds are in the habit of playing under penalty of two to six days’ imprisonment, if they were free or twelve to thirty six stripes in prison … if they were slaves.”40 Anyone found “naked on the shore” or “taking a bath uncovered, without due decency” would be punished by imprisonment or lashing. In spite of these measures, it remained a common custom for the poor in Recife to bathe nude … men, women and children bathed naked with the greatest non-chalance41. Slaves and backwoodsmen were forbidden to wear jewelries. The hatred and discrimination against the blacks and slaves were so pronounced that if they complained against maltreatment to the police against their masters, they were doubly punished then and there for daring to do so. VIII

The Orient contributed to the cultural contents of the Brazilians in various ways. The coexistence of the noble and ignoble classes as were evident in the hierarchical family and social life; ways of living, dressing and transportation which affected the ways of thinking. At the close of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, Brazil had an enormous Asiatic presence: palanquin, rush mat, market stall, public fountain, fireworks, concave tiles, women’s shawls and turbans. Whitewashed houses in the shape of a pagoda, the Indian coconut, palm and mango tree, sweet rice and milk with cinnamon, the cloves of Molucca, the cinnamon of Ceylon, pepper of Cochin China, the tea of China, the camphor of Borneo, the nutmeg of Banda, the fabrics and porcelain of China and India, the perfumes of the East; all these formed a mixture of nature and culture in Brazil. Until the transfer of the court of Portugal to Rio, the seat of European culture was Portugal. The Iberian culture was never exclusively European in Brazil but to a large degree an admixture of Nordic, Moorish, Arabic, Israealite and Mohammedan cultures. To this was added the cultures of India, China and the Far East. With the growing presence of the British in the economic life of Brazil during the 19th century, those favouring Westernization found the oriental presence awkward. Even ‘European’ trees and plants began to replace the oriental and African ones. The Brazilians began to see themselves through the eyes of the foreigners – meaning the Nordics. 33

CHAPTER 1

Against the preference for ‘cover’ – both natural and social – the new Brazilians wanted ‘unshadowing’. This meant carriages to be fitted with English glass instead of curtains, wide streets replacing the narrow ones, substituting the capes, mantles, mantinillas or shawls with transparent french veils, unshadowing of men’s faces by the use of English razors; unshadowing by means of the western system of illumination replacing whale oil, tallow and candle; unshadowing customs, manners, habits and gestures in the relation between man and woman. Western techniques of production, transportation, and urbanisation pushed Brazil to a new era of material and moral existence. But these had their disadvantages too. Orientalism helped Brazilians adapt to the tropical environment. Unshadowing of Brazil interrupted this process. The tropical rays of the Sun or the rains cannot be fought without shades. Narrow streets, shawls, broad parasols or shade-conferring trees offer people protection. Curtains, shutters, blinds, mats give a soothing environmental effect. Brazil learnt these through experience and contacts with the Orient. Brazil was a vast Portuguese Goa. The meeting of East and West produced an admixture of culture which took into account the color, landscape and human beings. Economically, Brazil and the Orient came closer through both regular and irregular commerce. Malabar, the oriental textile center, supplied the Brazilian demand of cloth. Before the advent of the British in the scene, Brazil imported cheap cloth for the poor and slaves from India. Glass beads, pearls, corals, knife with wooden handles, bullets, pistols, swords, daggers etc were exported to Brazil from the Orient. Huge quantity of tobacco and rum were sent through return voyages. The human traffic from Asia and Africa took place, vigorously at times, over the centuries. The idea of importing more whites to Brazil gained ground during the 1850s. Some doctors were vociferous against importation of Chinese labour, though, from the hygienic point of view, the Asians were much more clean in their habits than the Europeans. With the advent of industrialization, especially in Great Britain and France, oriental products began to lose out to the West. Brazil became a semicolony of the West. The very landscape which for long had been shaped by the forms and colours of the Orient, was altered. English ships, bound for the East Indies, China and other countries of Asia, used Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio as their ports of call. Thus, in addition to the ships from India, English and Anglo-American ships came to Brazil for reprovision, repair and other purposes. And during such calls, these ships traded with the local inhabitants. The official policy of Portugal did not approve of such trades. When Brazil became independent, direct trade with England started. But the English were not enthusiastic about the trade between Brazil and the Orient. Many items from India and China used to find their way to Brazil. An inventory of 1828 suggest that Indian cloves, yellow wax, tea, Indian china, porcelain, ivory, trays, jewel boxes, furniture, etc. were some of the items that entered Brazil. Diamond, emerald and ruby rings imported from India were marks of an aristocratic status. The sedan chair, common in large cities, till the early nineteenth century, was of oriental origin. So were the palanquins. As English products began to enter Brazil, the end of palanquins and sedan chairs came about. The Orient 34


began to disappear from stores, newspapers and advertisements, house-interiors and personal habits, as a result of incursion of European, mainly English, articles mass-produced in factories. The custom of sitting cross-legged on rugs, mats or floors, fondness for parasols, betrothing of girls while still children to men sometimes older than their own fathers, of ladies not appearing before strange men, wearing of shawls or mantillas, liking of bright colours, strong perfumes and highly spiced dishes – all these gradually disappeared. The custom of bowing, kneeling in the street when monarchs passed, eunuchs singing in the church, all these also disappeared. Some of these customs were brought by the gypsies. The great resemblance between colonial Brazil and Portuguese India was more than apparent. When the Portuguese court of colonial administration moved from Lisbon to Rio, one of the effects was the shifting of a large part of Portugal’s India trade to Brazil. Large quantities of cotton from India came to Brazil. Some were transshipped to various destinations, including the African ports and American ports south of the Equator. The intense re-Europeanisation of Brazilian society at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which coincided with the decline of the patriarchal system, made the Orient remote and vague. So remote that gradually it had to be searched for in the archives and museums. IX

Machines, brought by the English, replaced the slaves. The process liberated the blackman from slavery and serfdom. It also freed the animals which had hitherto been treated with unimagined cruelty. The steam horse, emitting ear-splitting noise, invaded the patriarchal society. A new society began to evolve. With industrialization, the free black or mulatto of the city became the most enthusiastic advocate of mechanization. He perceived in his mastery of the machine a way of bettering his social position, of improving his status and making himself important. In Pernambuco, during the first part of 1800, the majority of the best mechanics were of mixed blood. The European technicians and workmen, gradually transmitted their knowledge of the machines to the black and mixed-blood assistants who were intelligent and desirous for social advancement. This process took place in Pernambuco and Minas Gerais which were centres of social and technical revolution of Brazil during the early decades of the eighteenth century. In Rio de Janeiro, coloured women quickly picked up from French designers and dress-makers their art. They learnt not only their techniques but also their manners. Workmen or clerks of English (rather European) companies during the second half of the nineteenth century began to marry into some of the leading families of the region. The colour of the skin, contributed of itself, in the presence of an ‘inferior’ race, an aristocracy of the whites. In certain cases, the parents of daughters of leading families or the girls themselves, saw in these fair-skinned Europeans, the necessary guarantee against the nightmare of the ‘throw-back’ child of colour, result of an union between coloured women and white men of earlier generations. 35

CHAPTER 1

Introduction of European machines in the cities, mines and plantations, brought about a technical revolution. It was soon followed by a social revolution, as a new class of people, the technicians and the machinists appeared on the scene. They and their machines created a new social relationship which was quite different from that of the master and the slave. The new breed of mechanics or technicians were mostly mestizos and mulattos. Their sole asset was their newly acquired skill. The machine contributed to the emergence of a middle class of a middle race. Newspapers carried advertisements of the new machines pouring in Brazil. Everyone was affected by the advent of the newer imports. It shook the foundation of the slave-based system. From 1808 to 1820, Brazil experienced an economic, social and technical revolution. Steel, iron, copper, lead, anchors, bullets, wire, harness, carriages and surgical instruments, door locks, copper roofings, tin sheet, nails and vats, furnaces, clocks, stoves and coal figured prominently in the list of imported items. Then came the service mains: water pipes into the houses; sewers to carry off waste to the sea or rivers; sanitary fixtures, gas pipes. These marked the end of the patriarchal era, of the public fountains, water brought by the slave, and night soil carried by human beings, streets illuminated by oil. X

The most significant feature of Brazil during the period of the 19th century was the emergence of the college graduates many of whom were of mixed blood. This signified differentiation within the patriarchal society. The spacious big houses began to show a decline. The slave quarters transformed into shanty towns. The sons of big houses, trained in universities across Europe, began to assert themselves in the urban society. The sons of ‘peddlers’, the trading class, returned with an European education and became not only equal but in many cases, superior due to their higher attainments. The college graduates occupied important positions in the colonial administration– even those educated in Brazil. They represented the political triumph of the refined city man. Those educated abroad, could not, in the beginning, reconcile with the physical and social environment of Brazil. The ideas from Europe, especially from France of liberalism, human rights etc. found in Brazil a new social force – the creative spirits of the black, the mulatto, the Indian and the mestizo creating a new Brazil. The political rise of the university graduates revealed the transfer of power from the rural gentry to the intellectual aristocracy. For the mulattos and mestizos, a career in the Army was a viable option to rise in the social hierarchy. The war with Paraguay elevated many a person of mixed-blood to positions of authority. From the beginning of the 19th century, mulattos began to emerge in great numbers from the tenements and shanties. There, the poorer Portuguese and Italian immigrants were ‘shacking up’ with black or mulatto women. These women, in many cases, represented a considerable economic asset for the newly arrived poor European immigrants. They worked as laundresses, cooks, candymakers, and doll makers. 36


The free mulatto of the city grew up in an atmosphere of antagonism between the shanty and the mansion, between the tenement and the suburban residence. With the gradual bridging of the gulf, the enmity between the coloured people and the whites deepened. The attitude of a large number of whites in Brazil – particularly of the European immigrants – was one of terror at the time of independence. Some advocated protection from some European power so that African elements could be checked. Some advised miscegenation Colour prejudice contributed many a revolt and rebellion during this period. Colour of the skin or ancestry posed as a serious obstacle to social enhancement. Certificate of whiteness was the passport to social uplift. XI

Sao Luis, capital of Maranhao, achieved bourgeois affluence by 1800. The population of thirty thousand could be classified as follows: the most powerful were the Portuguese, next came the descendants of Europeans who had settled in Brazil; then came the half-breeds. It included both the mulattos and the mestizos. The various shades of the colour of the skin were regarded as castes within a system. Those possessing a skin colour approaching the whites were favoured more. In Brazilian literature there is a chart called Table of Mixtures which is given below:42 To become white White and negro produce mulatto Half white half black White and mulatto produce quadroon Three-quarter white and one-quarter Negro White and quadroon produce Octoroon Seven-eighths white and one-eighth Negro White and Octoroon produce white Completely white. To become Negro Negro and white produce mulatto Half Negro half white Negro and mulatto produce quadroon Three-quarters Negro and one-quarter white Negro and quadroon produce octoroon Seven-eighths Negro and one-eighth white Negro and Octoroon produce Negro Completely Negro. In a critical study of the folk-lores of Brazil one discovers the contempt in which a black person was held, even by his/her equals or near-equals. The mulatto is the son of the white man, The white man is the son of the king, 37

CHAPTER 1

The Caboclo, I don’t know of whom, As he is son of the forest, He neither wears shoes, Nor talks aught but nonsense. Or An old nigger when he dies Stinks like hell, Mother of God, don’t let him Go to heaven. Or The white man eats in the parlour, The Indian in the hall, The mulatto in the kitchen, The Negro in the privy. Even as late as in the middle of the 20th century, a black woman who ventured out wearing a ‘white woman’s hat’ covered with flowers, ribbons and feathers used to be jeered at by the street urchins. In the 19th century in Brazil mortality rate was high among women and children. The husband as a rule lived on to a ripe age, with three or four successive wives, and six to eight children by each. It was not rare to find cases of brothers on their father’s side some of whom were white, some Negroid and some with an Indian admixture. The three races lived with the same patriarchal family name. This resulted in great social tension. The religious traditions in Brazil bore the strongest African influence – more than blood, colour and physique. European religion could not conquer it. They acquired new forms through transculturisations with European and indigenous values. The Africanising influence was exerted by the mulatto nurses who taught the white children to talk. The first lessons in Portuguese transmitted to them African traditions, songs, and superstitions. The mulatto cooks Africanised the European cuisine. The beautiful mulatto women married white businessmen, army officers, police executives, sons of immigrant Germans, Italians and Spaniards. The “saints room’ and chapels of certain patriarchal city mansions in Rio and Bahia are still transformed on certain days of the year into veritable Voodoo shrines. The same candles which illuminate Our Lady with Infant Jesus in her arms are illuminating African divinities disguised as Catholic saints. Nobody is so deluded to think, as the ‘purists’ believe, that the Brazilians with their coloured cousins are really a Latin people. The doors of the shrines opened wide to admit African idols disguised as St. Cosme and St. Damian, coal-black St. Bendedict or St. Iphigenias. In the hands of image-makers, even Our Lady takes mulatto traits. And the most popular image of Christ in Brazil is that of a dark, pale Jew with black or at most brown hair and beard. The most important characteristic of the Brazilian social milieu is the reciprocity of cultures. This has been brought about by intense social mobility between races, classes and regions across horizontal and vertical directions. 38


There is, of course, visible antagonism in social and cultural life. This is reflected in politics, too. Clashes and rivalries between groups and regions manifest them. There remains considerable inequality between the haves and have-nots in the industrial as well as agricultural spheres. The meeting of cultures, like that of races, under conditions which do not sacrifice the expression of the desires, tastes, and interests to the exclusive domination of the other is often disposed towards development of new and richer cultures. The greatest disadvantage lie in the isolation or the social gulf which hampers the possibility of contact between one group and another, one race and another. SECTION –3 I

On 15th November 1889, in a peaceful ‘revolution’, the Emperor was made to quit the throne. However, in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, a few incidents took place in which the blacks, loyal to the throne, took to the street, unarmed of course, to protest against Republicanism. They were victims of violence unleashed by the whites who were supporters of Republicanism. This almost jeopardised the fraternization between blacks and whites achieved during the Paraguayan War. Needless to mention that the Republicans did not do anything to undo the past. They pledged to continue the policy of the Empire. Their slogan was ‘Order and Progress’. There took place only a transfer of power. We shall now present a kaleidoscope of social and cultural realities which dominated the 19th as well as the first-half of the 20th century. Manuel Bandeira43 learnt how to read and write in two Recife schools. This was during the last leg of the 19th or the first decade of the 20th. In neither of these schools, there was any playground. The use of palmotoria (beating by palm leaves) was still in use. The children played only at home or in the streets. School was a place of study only. There the children received punishment for the slightest demeanour. The street epitomised freedom – freedom from dull domestic and school routine. The cult of blond, blue-eyed dolls among the upper class girl children during the second half of the nineteenth century had an element of Aryanism. One lady44, born in Bahia in 1853, confessed that she considered blacks an inferior race, persons from whom one should maintain a social distance. Another lady, born in 187445, was convinced of the necessity to support white supremacy in Brazil. She was always upset at the news of the marriage of any relative with a person of colour. There were exceptions too. Dona Henriqueta Galeno46, who lived in Ceara during her childhood and grew up in a paternalistic environment, wrote that she was free of any racial prejudice. Playing of the piano was in vogue in the Empire and the Republic. The passage from the concert hall to the private home took place as the grand piano became a status symbol. It was a manifestation of taste and social prestige – in the aristocratic villas of the suburbs, the middle class city homes or the mansions of the planters.47 Isaac N. Ford48, an Anglo-American publicist, while visiting Brazil to observe the effects of the transformation from monarchy to republicanism, noted that the 39

CHAPTER 1

Brazilians were not impatient with the republican institutions. They never expected that republicanism would bring about a quick national regeneration. However, they were psychologically living in an aura of future industrial development. They had no objection to the intrusion of the future upon the present as long as the change was gradual and did not involve a complete repudiation of the past. It was a gradual process of transformation, with the new President of the Republic giving himself the air of a constitutional emperor; with separation of the church from the state, without weakening of Catholicism as a national institution; with the employment of the former members of the court in important administrative posts under the republic. However, there was a visible change in the cultural order. Instead of emanating from France and England, the new inspiration came from the northern neighbour – the U.S.A. It was from this shift that there arose a series of consequences of immense importance. Constitution Law and Administrative Law had to be studied in English. Just before the proclamation of the Republic, the U.S.A. was influencing the Brazilian culture in various ways. The emperor himself had taken the initiative in this direction. While visiting the U.S.A. in 1876, the emperor declared that he wished to see in Brazil, not cannons but modern industrial and agricultural machinery. He paid a visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where Brazil had won more prizes than any other South American nation (421 against 80 by Argentina and 40 by Chile). An exposition of American (U.S.) products took place in Rio de Janeiro. Photographs, maps, books, engravings, lithographs, and farm implements were exhibited there. This exhibition played a historic role in the development of cultural relations between Brazil and the U.S.A. Brazil soon came to admire many U.S. products which they considered superior to those of Europe. During Pedro II’s reign, Brazil started the construction of railways. During this period occurred the laying of submarine cables to Europe, introduction of gas for illumination, extensive modernization of water and sewage systems, and other urban amenities like hospitals, theatres etc. Urban transformation improved with introduction of street cars. Huge American investments were being made in various sectors.In a negative way, too, the U.S. made its presence felt in Brazil. Immigrants from the American South arrived after the defeat in the civil war. The newcomers brought racial prejudice and opposed abolition of slavery. The U.S. influence in matters of politics, economics and technology greatly democratized the Brazilian society. II th

To an outsider in the last decade of the 19 century, Brazil was making good progress in public education. In 1869, Brazil had one primary school for 540 students (free-born). Within five years the ratio improved to 1:314. In 1889, the year of the Republic, the ratio was 1:40. The most important institution of higher learning during the reign of the last emperor was the Imperial Academy, also known as Pedro II in the name of the 40


emperor himself. Under his direct supervision, this institution offered a quality education. It conferred the degree of Bachelor of Letters. The quality control mechanism was such that in 1887, out of a total enrolment of 569, only 12 degrees were granted. Graduates of Pedro II were the higher elites, enjoying free access to all branches of human knowledge. Carlos49 learned his alphabets at home. Thereafter, he entered a local public school at Queimadas. Here he mastered the elaborate calligraphy of the time. He learnt reading, studied grammar, sentence analysis, taking dictation, arithmetic up to the metric system, physical geography and religion. Each Saturday, the students carried home a report card with grades for the week in attendance, lessons and behaviour. Punishment in this school consisted of admonishments, reduction in weekly grades, enforced periods of standing up, loss of recreation periods, detention after school hours, being made to pick up small pieces of paper and in extreme cases, a close chat with the ruler. There was no ground in the school for recreation of the students. The recess was spent largely in moving around a bit and stretching the legs. The next school of Carlos was the Portuguese Literary Lyceum. Here he learnt Portuguese grammar and French. Passing out in flying colours, Carlos was admitted to Pedro II. Since he wanted to be an engineer, Carlos buried himself in the study of mathematics. Engineers were in great demand in the first decades of the Republic. Carlos began to learn English, German and French. However, he managed to master only French, then considered an essential second language in Brazil. Raimundo Dias50, born in Piaui in 1874, studied in a number of primary schools. The first at Jerumenha was run by one Dona Ludovica. She was a cultivated woman who taught with affection and sincerity. The second one at Amarante had ‘Old Jose’ as the teacher. In these two schools Raimundo learnt the alphabets, formation of sentences and arithmetic tables. These were learned by rote. ‘Old Jose’ was a strict disciplinarian. He resorted to palmotoria whenever he felt like. At times, the unfortunate child was forced to walk in the street carrying ridiculous placards or wearing the mask of an ass. Neither of these two schools could boast of a playground. As if two schools were not enough, Raimundo attended a third primary school in the province of Maranhao. In this school, use of notebooks (exercise books) for teaching of writing and arithmetic was unknown. The fourth one attended by Raimundo was situated in Recife. Here, under one Dona Maria Rita, Raimundo went through the same teaching sequel and the same punishments. Thereafter, this experienced teenager got admitted to the Gymnasium of Pernambuco, known as Pedro II of the North-East. The teacher in the first class here was a strict and demanding man. Here the boy made progress in reading, writing and arithmetic. His uncle, now provincial President of Pernambuco, instructed him to study Portuguese and French for the preparation of a career in business. By failing twice in his catechism lessons, the boy incurred the displeasure of some teachers. Despite being the nephew of the provincial President, he was 41

CHAPTER 1

punished like any other boy. The punishment was barbarous. Once, while his hands were bleeding owing to palmotoria, he refused to submit to further punishments. He was summarily expelled from the school. Raimundo then got himself admitted to the Military Academy at Ceara and ultimately passed out from there. Astrojildo Pereiro51 was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1890. He desired to be a monk. Astrojildo entered the Colegio Anchieta in Nova Friburgo. The teaching method was church-oriented with daily masses and other routines. Here, though doing well in his studies, he wrote a pornographic manuscript. From Anchieta, Aostrojildo went to Colegio Abilio in Niteroj. Here the atmosphere was quite open. He participated in literary discussions and began to write amorous verses. He became interested in politics, too. Eventually, he became an anti-militarist and atheist The Colegio Anchieta was one of his worst memories and the Colegio Abilio never taught him what he intended to learn. Finally, be became a Marxist. Amilcar Armando52, born in the province of Rio de Janeiro in 1880, learned his first letters on the family coffee plantation from his grandmother. Thereafter he was admitted to a kindergarten school run by Dr. Meneses, one of Brazil’s foremost educators during the reign of Pedro II. He entered the Brazilian Athenaeum when he was 12. The punishment here was moral. The school was co-educational, an innovation in a period marked by conservatism. He, later, pursued higher education in military and civil engineering. Manuel Bandeira53, one of Brazil’s greatest poets, had his preliminary schooling in Recife. He then went to Rio de Janeiro and got admitted to Pedro II, then christened as the National Gymnasium. He studied drawing, music, mechanics, literature and logic. The Imperial system of education in Brazil sought to unify the national cultural centres: Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Sao Paulo, Olinda and Recife. This encouraged maintaining a high standard on a pan-Brazilian scale. Brazilians from all parts of the country sent their children to these centres to train them in law, medicine, engineering, pharmacy, military science and humanities. In these centres of learning, Brazilian children from various provinces got acquainted with one another. Many of them carried this relationship forward even after they became famous in their respective fields. Dona Virginia Cavalcante54 was born in Pernambuco in 1879. She attended a primary school where the method of instruction was to recite aloud and memorize lessons down to the last comma. The weekly arithmetic test complete with palmatoria was the terror of the students. Other punishments included remaining standing with the book open for a long period of time. She was fond of making doll’s clothes and became quite skilful at this. Always an admirer of France, she taught herself the French language and came to read French magazines, fashion books and classics. She learnt neither English nor German. Most of the cultural movements, during this period, originated from Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Sao Paulo. Sao Luis de Maranhao, a conservative centre, was in decline already. Porto Alegre, a future leader in regional and national culture, had not yet begun its rise to prominence. Bahia of course, was a very important city 42


during this period. Beside sugar, the state of Bahia in the late 19th century produced cacao, cotton, tobacco, coffee, hides, wood, ornamental feathers, and fruits. It had a population of 1.8 million of which half were mestizos. Its cuisine was nationally famous. The city could boast of two theatres. There were 120 churches with more than a hundred monks from Germany and Belgium. The most important centre of learning was the Academy of Medicine, which was the pride of the city. In spite of various centres of learning, the Brazil of Pedro II, according to foreign observers55, was deficient in intellectual progress, particularly in the field of experimental sciences. In a patriarchal slavocracy such progress, it was felt, was difficult to achieve. A host of foreign terms entered the Portuguese language as a result of foreign technical inputs. These terms were, of course, corruption of the original word which underwent transformation by use by workers and technicians. Thus, embasamento (foundation) was a corruption of emvasamento. Workers used the words sulipa (railroad tie or ‘sleeper’), breque (brake), encruenca (from German Kranke) as though these were Portuguese words. The word ‘Senhora’ was applied to foreigners seeking employment as laundresses, nurse maids, cooks or serving maids, thus using a term of dignity, hitherto inconceivable to Brazilians in association with domestic labour. The Press, both political and literary, played an important role in the cultural development of the country. Since the beginning of the Empire, thanks to the freedom enjoyed by the Press, there was intensive print media activity throughout the country in which literature and politics were mixed together. This developed a bond between the writers and the Brazilian public. It helped in breaking down the rigid division between ‘popular’ and sophisticated styles as well as those of racial and sexual divide. By the turn of the century, the prestige and influence of journalism had surpassed the supremacy of the pulpit. The position of the writer, owing to a growing reading public, attained a new dignity and independence. The true phase of literary appreciation came at the end of the monarchy with the appearance of esteemed publishers like the Garnier. The first French style paperbacks of eminent authors were now published. As the old patriarchal family system was disintegrating, along with the code of relations between man and woman, old and young, master and slave, there now emerged the embryo of a new Brazilian society marked by a nostalgia for the past and enthusiasm for the future. The enthusiasm was reflected in the fondness of the young people for Jules Verne with his fantasies involving possible technical innovations either in discussions or on the drawing board. It has been asserted by some observers56 that Brazilian literature produced by the mestizos was one of the best in the Portuguese language. The language of Brazil preserved the gravity of Latin, the sweetness and flexibility of the Italian, and did away with the disadvantage of the harsh guttural sounds of Spanish. In course of time, in the hands of appropriate persons, the language would produce a world class literature that would attract the respect and admiration of the entire world. An Anglo-Saxon57 writer has opined that the records of Brazilian life as manifested in its current literature had made a considerable social impact. These 43

CHAPTER 1

works showed that many Brazilians were coming out of the European influences in thought and behaviour. Such manifestations were given epic dimension in the vigorous pages of Euclydes de Cunha’s ‘Os Sertoes’ (Rebellion in the Backlands) and many other similar works. Many Brazilians of indigenous or African descent championed the thesis that they were a truly Latin race. They opposed the nativist tendencies of young intellectuals like Gilberto Amado. Beside literature, the Brazilians began to contribute vigorously in the science of economics, history of Brazilian literature, historical research etc. III

The Republican Government, from its very inception, made every effort to retain the monarchic principle of order and authority within the framework of a democratic structure. However, the fluidity among races, classes, cultures and regions, antagonistic at times, created problems, which had to be controlled by application of political force. The advances and retreats of the paternalism of the crown and that of the plantation – a veritable ballet dance – marked the early decades of the Republic. Sociologically speaking, both survived in the Republic. The President of the Republic assumed, in some respect, the role of the Emperor. An additional element, the army, appeared to play a significant role. It paid lip service to the Republic but in all practical purposes was feudal and aristocratic. Brazil, as early as the last quarter of the 19th century, was more racially tolerant than the United States, claim sociologists58. The Imperial constitution made no distinction between races and colours of the skin. The black or the brown could attain through one’s talent and energy positions which could not be attained in the United States. Foreign observers in Brazil came across many intelligent people who were educated in Paris or Coimbra and whose ancestors were slaves. It has been claimed that in Brazil during the period under discussion, if a man had freedom, money and merit, no matter how black might be his skin, no place in society was refused to him. There was no distinction of colour in the medical, law or theological colleges. Another observer, after living in Brazil for four decades, wrote in 1914 that several Brazilians of African descent during the reign of Pedro II had received decorations and titles. The process of upgrading men of modest origin or ethnic ‘inferiority’ through academic excellence increased with the advent of the Republic. Both civil and military channels were found helpful in the process. With the armed forces playing a more active political part in the affairs of the nation, a military career offered a greater opportunity than ever for the political and social ascension of mestizos, mulattos and even humble whites. The idea of white supremacy, however, never occupied a back seat in the psyche of the people. It became quite apparent during the Presidency of Manuel Ferraz de Campos Seles (1898–1902). He made a naval trip to Argentina with the accompanying vessels manned by pure-white crews. Many saw in this move an open hatred towards the African and native-born Brazilians.59 44


Technical and vocational schools, set up during the Empire, served to integrate the races and classes during the Republic. Previously, people used to associate the exercise of mechanical arts ethically with the black or mulatto population and socially with the slave. The notion changed when German and Swiss immigrants dedicated themselves as farmers and cabinetmakers. They, by their example, gave a new dignity to manual labour. The vocational schools, through systematic training, produced master-carpenters, cabinetmakers and other artisans60. Not only these advanced racial or class integration, but also developed a sort of class-consciousness among the artisans. Every effort was made to impart vocational training to the poor. The reason was to emphasise the need to employ whites as well as blacks in tasks previously performed exclusively by the slaves and migrants from Europe. Many Brazilians considered the expense thus incurred necessary to speed up the process of replacing slaves with free workers as a result of the passage of the ‘Law of Free Womb’. Such programmes included the training of poor Brazilian children for gainful occupations and rescuing, through government and private sources, thousands of abandoned children from the depths of misery. Vocational training in specially established schools seemed to be the most effective means of developing the hitherto neglected human resources. Several higher educational institutions for imparting technology were established during the Empire. The Polytechnic School and the School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro; a pharmaceutical school, a normal school and a school for horticulture at Santa Cruz; medical schools at Bahia and Rio; schools in the Amazonas for educating the indigenous population. These endeavours assumed further importance during the Republic. Technologists began to assume considerable social and political importance. Representatives of the working class population began to appear in state and national legislatures. Some of the migrant population mixed freely with the black and the brown races. It was particularly true of the Italians. Off-springs with a pale complexion, blue eyes and blond hair were quite common in the Sao Paulo region. IV

The Republic brought about considerable progress in ethnic democratization. It extended social and political opportunities to persons of color who had made themselves through education worthy of advancement in different spheres in gaining economic status or in joining military service. The indigenous people and Brazilians having indigenous blood enjoyed a phase of romantic prestige. The patriotic emotions even induced some to change their Portuguese family name. The food habits of the indigenous people once again became quite popular. The credit of driving away the Dutch or the French infiltrators was given to the native Brazilians. However, such love for native Brazilians did not extend to the corridor of power. There were strong racially-conscious elements in the Republican Government who wanted the Brazilian foreign service personnel to be ‘well-born’ and educated, with pronounced Caucasian features and white complexion. They should be married to 45

CHAPTER 1

women who, if not always beautiful, should be as elegant as possible in dress and bearing, white or near-white in complexion and reasonably fluent in French or English. Both the trends influenced the generation that was born during the period of Republicanism. Florence Carlos61, who was born in 1882, had observed that his attitude towards blacks and mulattos had always been one of tolerance and goodwill. However, he did not favour the idea of more Asian and African immigration as that would, in his opinion, upset the ethnic order of Brazil. Heitor Modesto62, born in Minas Gerais in 1881, reacted with great sympathy to the abolition of slavery. In his home, the slaves were considered part of the family and many of them, after being free, remained in their homes for the rest of their lives. He confessed, however, that he always preferred pure blacks to mulattos who were, in his opinion, the natural enemy of the white man. Antenor Nascentes63, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1886, testified that being a mulatto, his feeling towards mulattos and blacks had been one of solidarity. Since his childhood he had experienced social inferiority of the coloured person. They were victims of prejudice. Jose Rodrigues Monteiro64, born in Ceara in 1887, said that he was always against the union of blacks and mulattos with the whites. He further stated that he would be greatly displeased if any of his relations married a person of a darker skin. Manuel Duarte65, born in Rio Grande do Sul in 1883, felt that there existed ‘a frank distinction between persons of colour and the so-called whites of European origin’. There was a perennial social inequality and an automatic separation of races by voluntary choice. As for marriage between a member of his family and a person of a darker skin, he felt that the old proverb ‘marry equal, marry well’, would apply best. Dona Isabel Henriqueta66, born in Bahia in 1853, confessed that she had always been against abolition. She considered the black an inferior race and felt that any racial mixture, legal or illegal, merited condemnation. Joao Barreto67, born in Pernambuco in 1872, felt most sympathetic to blacks and mulattos. He did not know why he was so fond of Pernambucan mulattos. He felt that Brazil’s racial situation was both historical and social. Society did not create the mulatto, he said. The mulatto entered through the door of history. The Brazilian, though priding on Aryan purity, was always a mulatto in spirit. As for marriage between a member of his family and a person of a darker skin, he said that he would accept the situation without the slightest reluctance or regret. Plinio Barreto68, born in Sao Paulo in 1882, stated that he had never looked down upon the blacks and the mulattos. It was difficult for him to decide how he would react to his son or daughter marrying a coloured person. He felt that he would experience some difficulty unless the person was outstanding in achievement. But if the case was an outcome of love, his hesitation would disappear. For the Pernambucan Adolfo Faustino69, born in Olinda in 1887, the white came first, followed by the Indian, then the mulatto and, finally, the black. He would not look with favour any union of a member of his family with a blackskinned person. 46


Pedro de Coutto70, born in Rio in 1872, confessed that being of Portuguese descent, he had no racial prejudice and would not look for a blond wife but instead marry a mestizo. Julio de Mesquita71, born in Sao Paulo in 1892, confessed that he could not agree to bring people into a world where they would be unfortunate. In Brazil, he felt, the blacks and the mulattos were the unfortunate people. Guaracy Silveira72, born in Sao Paulo in 1893, said that if he were black, he would seek marriage with a coloured girl a bit lighter in complexion than himself… As a white, he would not consider it wise to marry a girl with a black skin even though he felt no repugnance for such persons. Roberto Cristina73, born in Rio in 1881, said that the number of whites had risen from 40% to 65% over the period since 1901 and the remaining 35% of the population seemed to him to have become 50% lighter than they were in 1901. He predicted that in another 75 years the question of colour would completely disappear in Brazil. Nevertheless, he would not look favourably upon a marriage of one of his family members with a person of colour. Erasto Gaertner74, born in Parana of German-Brazilian parentage in 1900, said that if any of his daughters had chosen a coloured husband, he would consider her mad. V

The effect of the transformation from monarchy to republic upon society was quite gradual. The changes that took place were more psychological than sociological. In a study of the Brazilian Foreign Exchange situation published in 189675, its author pointed out that there occurred a weakening of the Brazilian finance with the proclamation of the Republic. He claimed that this was due to a lack of confidence in the new regime. However, in actual fact, as pointed out earlier, the Republic at its birth was infiltrated by monarchial elements. Its anti-monarchism was purely superficial. It was essentially a continuation of the old regime. The weakening of the currency was essentially the result of the abolition of slavery and would have plagued the economy under the monarchy if it continued. There were indications of material progress. According to an author76, the end of the Paraguayan War and proclamation of the Law of Free Womb coincided with the inauguration of the first docks in the port of Rio de Janeiro and the granting of concessions for the construction of railways. From this time on, there was a marked material progress. It may be pointed that in Brazil, economic and social progress did not go hand in hand. The case of Sao Paulo can be cited in this respect. In the first-half of the 19th century, it had developed an opulence and vigour which was experienced during the early colonial period in Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhao and Rio. It became a region of Big Houses and slave quarters, of masters and slaves. Previously, the way of life was sober, to the point of being ascetic, balanced by a diversified economy, with an agrarian landscape marked by modest houses and small–scale cultivation. Ethnically, Sao Paulo was similar to Paraguay, with its heavy Spanish-Guarani element and rampant miscegenation. 47

CHAPTER 1

As the economy of Sao Paulo changed from sugar to coffee, slaves were brought from the North. In addition to that, the nineteenth-century neo-aristocracy attracted college-trained people – sons of the planters hit by the decline of sugar. These young men came to make fortune, married into established Paulista families. Some of these people were even dark-skinned who became leaders in the political, economic and cultural fields. This assimilation and absorption brought about a corresponding transmigration of sociological patterns from the slave areas to the coffee plantations of neo-aristocratic Sao Paulo: a whole complex of forms, values and social rituals expressive of an aristocratic way of life. As gold mining exhausted, Sao Paulo faced a terrible economic crisis until the cultivation of coffee was started there. Excellent highways were built to facilitate the economic growth of the province. The cost of construction of railways was quickly paid. During 1870–71, 96 transatlantic ships and 151 coastal ships entered the port of Santos. The numbers quickly rose to 475 and 678, respectively, in 1872 and 1873. The rise was unprecedented. It marked the economic supremacy of Sao Paulo over other provinces. In another study of the Brazilian economy77, the author has pointed out that the first decade of the Republic was marked by the establishment of Sao Paulo as the economic center of gravity of the country. During that decade not only the coffee of Sao Paulo had become the country’s leading agricultural product, but the industries of the State had begun producing materials which, by dual avoidance of shipping costs and protective tariffs, became competitive with foreign imports. A great period of Brazilian industry then commenced, noted the author. Still another author78 suggested that the period marked the beginning of a shift of capital from agriculture to industry. The Bank of Brazil merged with the Bank of the Republic to form a new organisation to promote industry. This amalgamation was accompanied by Acts exempting industrial machinery from taxes, guaranteeing interest on industrial investments, nationalizing coastal navigation and for payment of bonuses to individual industry. The established distributive network for coffee was utilized for the distribution of products of the newly established industries. Some authors79 have explained the North-South disparity in terms of the foreign white immigration. In the South, the slave labour was increasingly being replaced by Italian immigrant workers. Such replacements were lacking in the North and the North-East largely because the electoral interests had favoured the South at the expense of the North, it has been alleged. The Southern climatic condition also favoured such immigration, they say. The prices of cotton and sugar fell in the North. Furthermore, the monocultural sugar economy of the North created feudal employment modes for labour which were not conducive to the frontier European settlements. In 1872, a colonizing service was created at Comandutuba. This enterprise was no less a failure than that of an earlier attempt at establishing a German colony at Pernambuco. The Bahian land was of superior quality and the climate was also ‘European’. But it was far away from the sea and uncomfortably close to the sultry interior. The Pernambucan colony at Catuca brought immigrants on contract from Austria, Germany and Poland. However, the immigrants were not farmers and less 48


prepared for tropical living conditions. As a result, the colonists suffered from chiggers, lice, gangrene, dysentery, malaria and other varieties of tropical diseases. The colony folded up miserably. Another ‘European’ colony to fail in Bahia was founded in 1882 at Caravelas. The colonists were Spaniards. Months went by but the settlers could not clear the land. Chiggers, liver ailments, malaria and yellow fever retarded the pace of settlement. Such were the fate of the new colonies in the North and the North-East because the landlords did not want free white labour in the vicinity of their property. The only plots of land these landlords were prepared to concede for such immigrants were those far away from the fazendas. They were also not interested in encouraging the development of small-scale farming. In the State of Minas Gerais, economic diversification took place after the end of its adventure with mining in the early days of the Empire. The gold rush which developed in colonial times caused agriculture to play a secondary role. But once the mining fever was abated, the Mineiros were wise enough to seek economic recovery through diversification, which included cultivation of sugar, coffee and corn. The condition of many a patriarchal family of the North-East declined from splendour to a dismal mediocrity. For many, the collapse of the sugar aristocracy made migration not only attractive but also necessary. Young Northerners were attracted by the romance of the Amazon. The attraction was rubber which rose into eminence as a great foreign exchange earner. Within a short period a rubber aristocracy got itself transplanted in the remote corner of Brazil. One Brazilian80, born in Paraiba in a sugar plantation in 1889, narrates that the Amazon in his youth had the force of attraction like a permanent magnet. Reaching Manaus in a third-class ticket he immediately got a job as a printer in the Journal do Commercio which had, at that time, the most sophisticated linotype machines. He eventually received a salary of 300 to 400 milreis a month which was a fabulous sum for a north-eastern farm boy, more than what was then being paid to a federal judge. The Amazonas, thanks to the boom in rubber, put all the other States to shame. Manaus was the first city after Rio and Sao Paulo to have an electric street railway, paved streets, electrified port facilities. Its opera house was the most famous and beautiful in all America. Among the newly rich, there were men who lit their cigars with 100 milreis notes and whose patio fountains sprouted champagne. They used to display not one but many French girls brought by British steamships before the envious eyes of less fortunate adventurers. The year 1915 marked the victory for Rio Grande do Sul’s most traditional industry. This was the raising of beef cattle. From the earliest times, Brazilians had considered dried beef a staple of their everyday diet and an indispensable ingredient to the national dish, ‘feijoada’. But it still seemed fantastic to most Brazilians when the French Government ordered a large quantity of this commodity for its army engaged in the First World War. The order came after the Brazilian meat-packing industry began to adopt modern practices with the installation in Sao Paulo of the country’s first meat refrigeration plant. From this time on, Brazilian meat products, both dried and frozen, began to assume importance in the European market. This coincided with the decline in the demand for rubber. 49

CHAPTER 1

VI

There was a campaign by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to propagate Brazil as a country of the white race. In this campaign the blacks were considered ‘a blot’ on the national civilization and also a great source of shame. It was the opinion of the campaigners that only through a great wave of white immigrants could Brazil develop a modern economy and a modern civilization. In this futuristic miscegenation, the Italians were considered the most appropriate targets. They were not rude like the Germans; they were intelligent, adaptable, friendly, likeable and above all, hard-working. They were not clannish. They did not lack in taste for darker-skinned persons. From 1820s through 1914, 1.3 million Italians had come to Brazil. By the end of 1915, the figure reached 2 millions. The immigrants who came to Brazil were artisans, skilled workers, machinists, and also industrialists. They either established or helped in establishing new techniques of production and transportation. The trend accelerated during the last decade of the 19th century. The process was less marked in Bahia than in Sao Paulo but it did take place there as also in Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais and Para. Both Brazilians and immigrants established these industries with great fervour. There were approximately 3,000 manufacturing establishments in the country by the beginning of the twentieth century. The most important manufacturing states were: the federal district with 35,000 industrial workers; Sao Paulo with 24,000; Rio Grande do Sul with 16,000; Rio de Janeiro with 14,000; Pernambuco with 12,000. The principal industry was textile. Minas Gerais was still of considerable importance in mining. There was a salt-mining industry in Rio Grande do Norte. Other industries included beverages, cigar and cigarette, mosaic tile, soap, matches, ceramics, canned foods and wagons. At the Rio Exposition held in 1908, the Brazilian Government sought to demonstrate the progress in industrialization. People from all parts of the country and abroad came to have a glimpse. Many came to see the change of face of Rio de Janeiro. Streets and boulevards were widened, dilapidated buildings demolished, elegant edifices came to dominate the central part. The streets were brightly lighted. Rio was ‘civilizing’ itself. Minas Gerais developed into a green belt of Rio de Janeiro. Rio lived on products produced in the Minas Gerais province from where milk, meat and fresh vegetables arrived each morning by train. Feeding the nation’s capital became a lucrative business for the Mineiros. The urban and industrial progress of Sao Paulo was largely due to assimilation of foreigners into the Brazilian culture, opine some experts81. The assimilation was carried out by the city and suburban schools. The Italians who came to the coffee plantations on the eve of abolition of slavery did not remain for long as farm hands. After a period, they were attracted by the commercial and industrial opportunities in Sao Paulo. There they competed the native Brazilians. They spoke their language, learnt their geography and history. They acquired technical and scientific knowledge through reading books in Portuguese82. 50


VII

The relationship between the Church and higher education was discussed by the members of the Chamber of Deputies in 1879. Many members did not like Catholic priests hobnobbing with an absolute government. They also opposed the idea of creating more free catholic colleges. They feared that these would be bastions of conservatism and orthodoxy. There were heated debates on the issue of separation of the Church from the State. In 1890 a law was passed in this regard and incorporated in the Constitution in 1891. A steady decline was observed in the number of people who wanted to become priests. With the break up of the patriarchal system, the career of a priest became a rather risky proposition. Previously, the religious activity had been more under the control of the patriarch than of the bishop. The clergyman comfortably filled the role of ‘uncle-priest’. He was almost a member of the family of the Big House. But in the new situation, the patriarchs were less willing to have their sons taking up priesthood as a profession. The decline in the number of aspirant psiests, however, strengthened the intellectual and moral qualities of the Brazilian clergy. Under the patriarchal regime, far too many entered priesthood for the social prestige attached to an eclesiastical career, with the result that the Brazilian clergy ‘became notorious for its immorality’. There was no class of men in the whole empire whose lives and practices were so corrupt as those of the priests, commented an observer83. The two decades just preceding the Republic were decisive in the modern history of Brazil. The Law of Free Womb (1871) marked the beginning of a national revolution in the field of labour. On the political side, the Republican Manifesto marked the emergence of the Sao Paulo–Minas Gerais-RioGrande do Sul region as the leading force in the national life. Positivism in the South and TeutonicSpencerian thoughts in the North marked the cultural perspective of the nation. All these seriously undermined orthodox Catholicism84. As the Church got separated from the State, many foreigners came to Brazil to fill the gap created by the unwillingness of many Brazilians to take up priesthood as a career. The Catholic schools gained a new vigour with the presence of academically trained foreign priests and nuns. A visitor85 in 1916 found many of the older schools run by Benedictines, Jesuits and Sisters of the Sacred Heart to be splendid in quality. The foreign priests spoke and wrote impeccable Portuguese. Many of them wrote textbooks for students. At Anchieta, there was a students’ band under Italian teachers. The training here was so thorough that a student could compose an opera for public performance. The religious educators of all shades accepted the protestant challenge of curriculum reform. This greatly improved primary and secondary education86. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant schools also made much impact on the school education in Brazil. In one such school, there was no punishment. The moral atmosphere was very pure. The teachers did everything for the sake of righteousness and created in the students a horror for everything low and vile. The secondary school curriculum did not have manual arts. This gap was filled up by schools in the late nineteenth century. The French influence in Brazilian religious education 51

CHAPTER 1

was not confined to the elegant schools in major cities. Many institutions for the poor had French churchmen in their service. There were several schools for orphans and underprivileged children of both sexes. In these schools, the boys were trained in various trades and the girls were given instructions in embroidery and dress-making. Several rural schools were run by the French. ‘Tremembe’, founded in 1903 by French Trappists, transformed large areas of underutilized land for rice cultivation. The Trappists found that one of the worst methods of exploitation was sale on credit resorted to by feudal elements. This was the reason why a large section of the poor lived in semi-slavery – the tyranny of the storekeeper, who was often an associate of the landowners, was marked. the Trappists fought this evil quietly. Silently and discreetly, they gave protection and social assistance to hundreds of social workers and their families. It is a pity that owing to Republican apathy the system could not spread to other regions. In this connection, the work of the industrialist Carlos Alberto de Meneses87 in the newly developed industrial areas of Pernambuco and Bahia should be mentioned. In 1904, through the initiative of the Christian Federation of Workers in Pernambuco, a petition was sent to the Chamber of Deputies expounding the necessity and advantages of organised labour and requesting enactment of a Law for formation of such organizations. The petition was signed by the Federation of Workers, representing seven affiliating organisations and fifteen others covering 6000 workers in the states of Pernamburco, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia, Paraiba, and Rio Grande do Norte. In the following year, a Bill was introduced in the Federal legislature. Law no 1635 based on the Catholic social doctrine was enacted on January 7, 1907. Between 1891 and 1904, Carlos Alberto de Meneses had developed considerable social action based upon Catholic principles and Christian feelings. As General Manager of an Industry in Pernambuco, he had made his company include various principles of social Christianity in its statutes. He instituted a programme of social service for his workers at the Goiana Mills and the Camargibe factory. It was his keen interest in the social question that led to the formation of the First Catholic Cooperatives in Brazil. Along with the cooperatives, Carlos Alberto reorganized the social programme of the Camargibe factory into a large workers’ corporation in 1900. The organisation had a mixed management involving the executives and the workers. The same was followed at Goiana Mills. It was through the initiatives of Carlos Alberto that the Federation of Christian Workers was established. Its first congress was held in Recife in 1902. Pernambuco was highly predisposed to initiatives of this kind. It was here that during the Imperial rule Fourierism was propagated by Louis Vanthieu. It was followed by Christian Socialism of Antonio Pedro de Figueiredo. VIII

For a considerable group of Brazilians, the Republic represented an eagerness to rapidly overcome the social and cultural problems. This eagerness became manifest in the so-called ‘Joao Candido’ naval revolt of 1910. Black and mulatto servicemen protested against flogging, which was then in vogue in the Navy. Flogging had its roots in the system of slavery. 52


The abolitionists and the new crop of industrialists liked a pace of progress that was more rapid from the Imperial period. The people craved for a perfection of things – cities, docks, industries, railroads, passenger and cargo ships. However, efforts to change the human resource was not much visible. Still, the desire for material progress benefited the people at large, though indirectly. It was during this period that Lloyd Brasileiro, with its cargo service and the railroads, with their lines of communication to the interior, brought about an extraordinary development. Automobiles imported from the U.S.A. and Europe were now popular even in the interior. All these acted as a constant challenge to business, industry and government to meet the problem of distance. A beneficial change came about in the social and cultural life of the people. By 1916, Brazil developed the capability to manufacture railway sleeping and dining cars from native wood. This was instrumental in the expansion of the railways in the Northwest. A company with British name and Belgian management began to operate. The construction of the railways was carried out under the direction of a distinguished Brazilian engineer named Firmo Dutra. Under his direction, the company not only laid tracks but also lined the right of way with the fruits of social engineering – coffee groves, pasture lands and new towns. In the field of sanitation and modernization of port facilities, the Republic achieved a great deal. An observer, writing in 194088, mentioned that in 1887 the city of Rio de Janeiro was periodically devastated by small pox and yellow fever. During the early years of the Republic, yellow fever was conquered. It was only during this period that boundary disputes with neighbouring states were solved amicably. The army was reorganised, the Navy reequipped, the railway network was enlarged, the principal ports were modernized and new industries such as meat packing came into existence. Brazil came to be regarded by educated Europeans as a new civilization in the tropics. Rio de Janeiro was now characterised as a city comparable to the most salubrious places in Europe. Foreigners could now become active to exploit the inexhaustible wealth of nature without danger to life or physical health, wrote French newspaper Le Figaro89. With the abolition of slavery and proclamation of the Republic, Brazil seemed to have revolutionized thoroughly. Though the basic form remained intact, the motives and styles of living became more romantic. This romanticism affected literature, politics, and jurisprudence. The military in Brazil in 1910 was well-fed, well-paid and well-cared for. However, the same could not be said of the vast majority of the workers. There were, practically, no law for social protection of the underprivileged including the industrial and agricultural labourers. An observer writing in 191990 commented that if one looked back over the past fifty years, he/she would have concluded that in the matter of concern for the working people, including the slaves, the record of the Imperial government was much better. There were, however, individual attempts by private industrialists who did not hesitate to take action in favour of the working people. At Bangu, an outskirt of Rio de Janeiro, the workers lived in cottages which had all the hygienic facilities. 53

CHAPTER 1

There was a community complex complete with a theatre where the workers could enjoy music and drama. Unfortunately, the number of such industrialists was not many91. Like the generations during the Empire, French was read and spoken by the cultivated Brazilian. Many politicians and men of letters wrote and spoke excellent French. Even those who wrote in Portuguese were heavily influenced by the French language, literature and culture. On the other side of the spectrum there were nativists who were interested to develop indigenous literature and science. A strong contingent was working on pharmaceutical innovations. When, in 1917, the geographer Elliott92 stated that the world owed much to Brazil in the field of horticulture and medicine, there were already many physicians in the Republic who, having lived and worked in the Amazon area, were using the drug of that region exclusively. Thirty years after the proclamation of the Republic, many sought to integrate the nation. There was awareness, too, for integration with the natural surroundings to form an indigenous tropical culture. National consciousness manifested itself in such matters as literature, medicine, pharmacology, hygiene and food. Brazil sought to have its own answer to elegant Europeanized tastes for soft drinks and mineral water in its nationally produced brands. The period marked the establishment in various places of hotels roughly imitiative of those of the great European spas. With the outbreak of the First World War, Brazilians turned to national resources in cures and remedies, thereby raising both the resort hotels and the drug manufacturing enterprises to the level of major industries. In this connection one can mention the development of a typhoid serum at the Dutanan Institute of Sao Paulo. Institute Osvaldo Cruz of Rio de Janeiro also achieved comparable fame. In such institutes and in the medical schools of Bahia and Rio, doctors joined hands with progressive industrialists and planters to help the Republic recover from the inertia of the Empire. The so-called ‘cultivated’ Brazilians had two deep resentments: that of being inhabitants of an almost entirely tropical country and having as compatriots a large number of mixed-blood population. However, what these Brazilians really resented but could not perhaps express was that the principal tropical disease was ‘ignorance’: the ignorance about themselves, about the society they live in; also the ‘ignorance’ of the people who belonged to the lower rungs of the society. The efforts of Brazilian industrialists, in this regard, became a source of national pride. Mention should be made of Assis Brasil93 of Rio Grande do Sul who combined an elegant political philosophy with considerable specialized competence in industrial agriculture. Former slaves and their descendants were offered by him a means of livelihood. From a vagabond existence, they were able to emerge as useful citizens fully integrated with the cultural and recreational patterns of the Brazilian society. It was a great contribution of the industry towards social uplift. The demonstration effects of such endeavours were tremendous. These were replicated in the field of sports later on. Thus, the Republic was a new experience with a somewhat less fervour that its most ardent supporters had looked for. 54


ECONOMIC

From the 11th century onward, the internal trades in Europe underwent an intensive growth. This necessitated supply of high quality products including manufactures from the Orient. The alternative trade route to avoid the ‘road block’ of the Ottoman Empire might be viewed as a major European accomplishment of the second half of the fifteenth century. The chance discovery of the Western Hemisphere was an off-shoot of the Oriental trade. It was due to pressure from other European powers that Portugal began to think of economic occupation of Brazil. The Portuguese had been engaged in relatively large-scale production of sugar in the Atlantic islands. The know-how of sugar manufacture, first developed by the Italians, was quickly adopted by the Portuguese.When sugar cultivation and production started in Brazil, the technological developments taking place in Europe came to its advantage. The Dutch contribution to the expansion of the sugar market in the secondhalf of the 16th century was the main cause of the success of agricultural settlements in Brazil. The Dutch had developed a commercial network for marketing sugar. The huge Brazilian sugar production benefitted from this Dutch commercial skill. Sugar demanded a huge manpower for cultivation and manufacturing. The Portuguese perfected a method of supplying such manpower from the days of Dom Henrique, the Navigator (1394–1460): the capture of African black people and transporting them as slaves. The economic and political conditions that were decisive for the Brazilian agricultural enterprise underwent a far-reaching change when Portugal was overtaken by Spain. The war between the Dutch and the Spaniards during 1580 to 1640 had profound repercussions on the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Sugar marketing in Europe was a Dutch enterprise. They were absolutely determined to defend their interest. To attain their objective they relentlessly strived to carry out their attacks against Spanish interests. They occupied the sugar producing region of Brazil for quarter of a century. They acquired a thorough knowledge of sugar production and distribution during this period. This enabled them to develop in the Caribbean a large-scale sugar industry. By the third-quarter of the 17th century the price of sugar fell to half its former level and remained stationary throughout the eighteenth century. The average annual income from Brazilian sugar by the second-half of the 17th century reached 50% of the peak period. The price was halved. The real income from sugar, therefore, was only a quarter of the income during the previous century. The Portuguese currency depreciation was of the same proportion by this time. Brazilian sugar, therefore, assumed enormous importance. The Portuguese Government, in spite of the enormous difficulties faced in Brazil – physical environment, reluctance and hostility of the indigenous population and high freight rates – carried out rapid development of the sugar industry. The privilege bestowed by the Government on the grandees was enormous. They received exclusive rights to manufacture cane-crushers and water mills. They were provided tax 55

CHAPTER 1

exemptions, guarantees against court attachment of production facilities, honorary recognitions etc. Since the early days of colonization, some communities had specialized in catching natives for slavery. African manpower was pressed into service to expand an already established enterprise. As the initial difficulties were overcome, sugar settlements underwent rapid development. The total volume of production by the end of the sixteenth century exceeded two million arrobas (sixty million pounds). The expansion was spectacular during the last quarter of the century – a tenfold increase occurred. There existed around 120 sugar mills by the end of the sixteenth century. Assuming that an average of £ 15,000 was invested for installation of each sugar mill, the total capital invested was around £ 1,800,000. It is estimated that around 20,000 African slaves were engaged in this sector. If £ 25 was invested for each slave, investment in manpower amounted to £ 375,000, assuming that three quarters of the above slave population was engaged in sugar. This amounted to 20% of the total capital outlay. Assuming again that the total value of sugar in a favourable year amounted to £ 2.5 million, and the net income was 60% of the same, and contributing to three-quarters of the total income, the latter amounted to £ 2 million. The European population being around 30,000, the income per head from sugar was quite high. Needless to mention that the entire sugar economy at the period depended heavily on the external demand. With slackening of the demand, a process of decadence would ensue. However, the sugar economy of the Brazilian North-east managed to resist even protracted depressions over centuries. It recuperated whenever conditions became favourable When, in the latter half of the 17th century, prices fell by 50% due to competition from the West Indies, Brazilian entrepreneurs kept production at a relatively high level. The price remained stationary over the next century. Internal conditions reduced the profit margin still further. The system entered into a state of lethargy. However, no structural change was enforced. When in the 19th century the situation brightened up, operations resumed at full vigour. The economy of the North-east in the 20th century was identified with sugar production and stock breeding. Development in both the sectors occurred through extension. During the period of depression which occurred during the period from the last quarter of the 17th and the beginning of the 19th century, the people migrated from the sea-coast to the interior, causing increase in population there as availability of food was relatively better. The expansion of the economy of the North-east during this long period consisted of a process of retrograde economic evolution: the high productivity sector was losing its relative importance whereas productivity in the stock-breeding sector declined in proportion to its expansion. Actually, such expansion represented the growth of the subsistence sector within which an increasing number of people was clustering. The economy therefore was converted from a high productivity economic system to one in which the majority of the population produced only what was necessary for its bare existence. 56


During the period of the Dutch occupation of Maranhão, the Portuguese colonists faced enormous difficulties. The disorganisation of markets for sugar, tobacco and other tropical products created obstacles in the development of capitalism and urbanisation. In the São Paulo region, the inhabitants went into the business of selling indigenous people as input of African slaves slackened. The Maranhão colonists tried to resort to this business also. However, they were constrained by the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco from where this kind of labour could have been imported. In Maranhão, a family could only be self-sufficient if it had acquired a number of slaves. Thus Indian ‘hunting’ was a precondition for survival. The Portuguese colonists of the Amazon basin, as they searched for indigenous people to work for them became acquainted with the resources of the forest. The region of present-day Para became an exporting zone for forest products: cocoa, vanilla, cinnamon, cloves and aromatic resins. It necessitated an intensive utilization of the Indians. They worked scatteredly in the forest and were not willing to submit to slave labour. The Jesuits tried to obtain their voluntary cooperation. The impoverishment of the sugar region had repercussions on the economy of the southern region. Hide and leather enterprises grew here in relative importance and stock-breeding gathered increasing importance. The subsistence sector also became relatively important throughout Brazil. The Portuguese Government could not transfer the small taxes levied in Brazil. It was for Portugal, in the declining condition of the sugar economy, to readjust the entire system in line with much lower levels of imports. Repeated currency devaluation reflected the imbalance of the Portuguese economy. The cost of maintenance of a colony the size of Brazil became increasingly difficult for Portugal. However, the Portuguese rulers were aware of the enormous economic potential of the mineral deposits in the Piratininga plateau which later became known as the Sao Paulo region. Technical assistance was liberally provided to the prospectors. At last gold was struck. Gold seekers from all over Brazil thronged the region. There took place a steady flow of Portuguese migrants. All of a sudden, the colony underwent a change of face. The mining economy opened up a European migratory cycle. Then the number of Europeans increased 10 times during the mining century. It was slave labour which was the basis of the mining economy. However, its characteristic was quite different from the sugar economy. The slaves did not constitute a majority of the working population here. The slaves were also given greater initiative. Many worked on their own, paying the owner a certain amount over a period of time. Many purchased their own freedom. The free white, black or mulatto prospectors had enough possibility to climb up the social ladder. Fixed assets per slave or per production unit was much lower than that of a sugar mill. It was possible to survive in business with even a small asset. A transportation network was a vital necessity of the mining economy. Situated at great distances from the harbour, dispersed widely through hilly terrains, the population was heavily dependent on a complex transportation system. Mules became vital transporters at the beginning. Even food had to be transported. The mining economy of the eighteenth century, therefore, afforded a market for cattle. This distributed the benefit throughout the Southern region. Rio Grande do Sul developed 57

CHAPTER 1

mule breeding on a large scale. The mining economy opened up a new cycle of development of the cattle-breeding and mule-breeding regions.94 The states of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso and Goias had a thriving mining economy. The export of gold registered a continuous rise over the first half of the eighteenth century. It reached a peak of £2.5 million in 1760. Then it began to drop gradually. By 1780, it amounted to less than £ 1 million. During the 1750s, the rate was steady at £2 million. The region gradually developed an internal market. There was no long-term infrastructural development for perpetuation of economic activity. As the output of gold dropped, a general decline set in. The slave-labour regime, however, avoided major social frictions. Still those who had invested substantially in slaves incurred heavy losses. As no structural modification was attempted, the liquidation of the productive enterprises was complete. Looking at the Brazilian economy during this period, it will be observed that it was a series of semi-independent systems, some of which were connected by trade. Others remained relatively isolated. There were two main productions– sugar and gold. The cattle-breeding economy of the North-east was connected to sugar. The Southern hinterland of the cattle-breeding economy was connected to gold. These two regions were networked by the Sao Francisco river. The cattle-breeding regions could thus choose the most advantageous markets. Maranhão and Para were two autonomous centres in the North. Forest-extractive economy was organised there by the Jesuit fathers. The export from this region rose to £1 million by the end of the 18th century. The difficulties faced by the Brazilian economy with the collapse of the gold trade continued due to various troubles in Europe. Then coffee began to emerge as a new source of wealth in Brazil. By the 1830’s coffee had emerged as a principal export product. Thus a nucleus of capital formation grew around Rio de Janeiro. This integrated the economies of the North and the South. By the middle of the 19th century, coffee came to be recognized as the saviour. It had production characteristics entirely in conformity with the Brazilian ecology. As the supply from Haiti faced problems, the Brazilian coffee trade got the boost. In the first decade of Brazilian independence coffee constituted forty per cent of the country’s export value. Coffee production was concentrated in the hilly regions around Rio de Janeiro. The availability of human resources was abundant as the surplus manpower from the mining economy concentrated there. With a port nearby, there was no problem in transportation. Mule convoy was in abundance. The pre-existing and underutilized resources found effective use. Although prices fell during the 1830s and the 1840s, it did not discourage the producers. Coffee export increased more than five times during 1821–30 and 1841–50. Coffee plantation was a perennial form of cultivation. It needed less capital investment than sugar as the equipment used was simpler and usually of local manufacture. Coffee prices showed an upward trend by the third quarter of the 19th century. During this period there was a migration from the North to the South A new managerial class emerged during the early period of the coffee economy. This section played a major role in the industrialization of Brazil. The vanguard of 58


this economy was composed of people having business experience. Production and marketing were integrated during the early phase. Proximity to the nation’s capital gave the coffee economy many advantages. The leaders of the coffee economy began to exercize an enormous influence on the Government. The trend towards controlling the political apparatus to the benefit of the economic group attained its climax with the achievement of state autonomy at the time of the proclamation of independence. Decentralization of power permitted complete integration of the groups ruling the coffee economy with the political and administrative machinery. This was utilized to achieve well-defined objectives. There were around two million slaves serving the Brazilian economy by the middle of the nineteenth century. The death rate among the slaves exceeded the birth rate. This fact alone indicates that contrary to the picture portrayed by many Brazilian sociologists, the living condition of the slaves was extremely precarious95. The diet of the slaves in the sugar region was especially deficient. With demands for slaves growing in the coffee plantations, internal migration intensified. This adversely affected cotton production in Maranhão. The reduction in the supply of Africans and the rising prices of slaves led to an intensification in the utilization of slave labour. This caused further depletion of the slave population. It was during this period that coffee growers organised migration from Europe. This received government support. It included the cost of transportation of the colonist and his family. The number of Europeans entering Sao Paulo rose from 13,000 in 1870s to 184,000 in the 1880s and 609,000 in 1890s. The total figure during the last quarter of the century amounted to 803,000 of which 577,000 came from Italy.96 Another great population transfer occurred in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th: it took place from the North-east to the Amazon region. Rubber, a forest-extracted product in the Amazon, was destined to become the raw material having the fastest growing demand in the world market. Since rubber was an extractive product and available only in the Amazon, the problem of increasing production to meet the growing world demand was an extremely difficult one. Prices of rubber had reached an average of £512 per ton during 1909–11, which was 10 times higher than the prevailing level of the previous half-century. With the far-eastern rubber coming to the market after World War I, the price fell to £100 per ton. Brazilian rubber export rose from 6,000 tons a year in the 1870s to 11,000 tons in 1880s, 21000 tons in 1890s and 35,000 tons in the first decade of the 20th century. Population in the provinces of Para and Amazonas rose from 329,000 in 1872 to 695,000 in 1900. It is estimated that an internal flow of 260,000 persons was organised. About 200,000 had arrived in the 1890s alone.97 This enormous human migration clearly indicates that at the end of the 19th century, there was a substantial manpower reservoir in Brazil. The plans of the North-eastern migrant bound for the Amazon were based on the price of rubber. As prices fell, poverty spread fast. Without the means for returning home and unaware of what was happening in the world rubber economy, the migrant resigned himself as resident. Compelled to eke out a living through hunting 59

CHAPTER 1

and fishing, he regressed to the most primitive form of subsistence economy. This was an enormous wastage of human resources at a time when manpower was extremely necessary for development of the Brazilian economy. By the middle of the 19th century, slave labour was an important issue. It was a long-established way of life in Brazil. The upper classes considered its abolition as a great disaster. It may be pointed out that abolition of slavery, like agrarian reforms, does not imply per se either destruction or creation of wealth. What it amounts to is a redistribution of property within a community. Like agrarian reform, the abolition of slavery entailed some changes in the way of organizing production and in the degree of utilization of the productive forces.98 In the North-eastern region of Brazil, the more easily cultivable land was almost fully occupied at the time of abolition. Freed slaves, on quitting the sugar mills, faced serious problems of survival. The urban zones already had a surplus population. Subsistence economy had been extended to the hinterland and it led to population pressure in the semi-arid zone. The result was that many former slaves had to work in the sugar mills at a relatively low wage. The coffee regions afforded the free slaves relatively higher wages. The abolition of slavery caused an effective redistribution of income in favour of manpower in the coffee region. However, at the earlier stages, this did not bring about higher productivity as the former slaves, raised under slavery, were unable to respond to economic initiatives. The Brazilian economy attained a relatively high growth rate in the second-half of the 19th century. There was a 214 per cent increase in the export quantum between the 1840s and the 1890s. This increase in the physical volume of exports was accompanied by a rise of approximately 46 per cent in the average prices of export products. On the other hand, there was a reduction of about 8 per cent in the price index of the export products, so that the improvement in terms of trade amounted to 58 per cent. This yielded a 396 per cent increase in real income. Thus the economy grew five–fold.99 The North-eastern region had undergone a decline in per capita income. However, in absolute terms, the income registered a rise. In Bahia, the per capita income remained stable. In the south, where the population was increasing at a rate of 3% a year, there was an 1% increase in the per capita income. In the coffee region a 2.3% per capita growth per year could be assumed. In the Amazon region, the absolute growth of income generated within the region attained a rate twice as high as that of the coffee region. On the basis of these figures, it may be assumed that the real income in Brazil multiplied by 5.4, implying a growth of 3.5% and a per capita growth rate of 1.5% during the abovementioned period of 50 years. The most pertinent event that occurred in the Brazilian economy in the last quarter of the 19th century was the increase in the relative importance of the wageearning sector. Previous expansions had taken place either through the slavery sector or through the multiplication of the subsistence sector. The external impulse for growth made itself felt in the form of rising prices for exported products. This yielded greater profits. Entrepreneurs tended to reinvest the profit by expanding the plantations. Given relative elasticity of manpower 60


supply and abundance of land, expansion proceeded without hindrance. In Brazil, transfer of manpower within the country as well as immigration from abroad took place, independent of rises in real wages in these sectors or regions. The coffee sector was able to keep real wages nearly stable throughout its long stage of expansion. As the new economic order began to operate on the basis of a wage-earning labour system, a series of problems began to appear. This had their roots in the old exporting and slavery economy. One of the problems resided in the impossibility of the system’s adapting itself to the rules of the gold standard which was the basis of the entire international economy. The problem was essentially this: at what prices could the rules of the gold standard be applied to a system specializing in the export of primary products and with a high import co-efficient? The problem did not bother the European economists who had always theorized on the subject of international trade in terms of economics of more or less similar degrees of development, with not very different production set-ups and relatively low import coefficients.100 The existence of a manpower reserve within Brazil, reinforced by a strong migratory flow, afforded the coffee economy a long period of expansion, without of course, any upward trend in real wages. The rise in average wages was reflected in the increased productivity which was obtained through the transfer of manpower from the subsistence to the export economy. Improvements in productivity achieved within the exporting economy could be retained by the entrepreneur to his benefit since he was not compelled to transfer it either wholly or partly, to the wageearners. Extensive, rather than intensive method of cultivation did not necessitate improvements in technological innovations. Since there was no pressure for increasing the wages, entrepreneurs had no interest in replacing manpower by capital. Since every increase in productivity was transformed into profit, it would always be more interesting to produce the greatest quantity possible per unit of capital and not to pay even the least possible quantity of wages per unit of production. The same was true for land. If land were scarce, the entrepreneur would have an obvious interest to improve methods of cultivation as well as to intensify capitalisation in order to boost profit. But as land existed in abundance, the entrepreneur tried to utilize it by applying a minimum of capital per unit of surface area. In the 1890s, the situation was exceptionally favourable to the expansion of coffee growing in Brazil. Non-Brazilian sources of coffee faced a period of difficulty. Plantations in Sri Lanka stood practically destroyed by an outbreak of disease of the coffee plant. Brazilian coffee production rose from 3.7 million 60-kg bag in 1880-81 to 5.5 million in 1890–91 and 16.3 million in 1901–2. The elasticity of manpower supply and abundance of land in the coffee producing countries indicated that on the long term coffee prices would tend to fall under the prevailing condition of investment on railroads, ports, and maritime transportation, all of which were in a state of growth during the last quarter of the 19th century. The Brazilian investors had only a limited choice of further investments. So long as coffee prices did not fall, the capital available within Brazil continued to flow into the coffee economy. Thus it was inevitable that coffee production would grow. 61

CHAPTER 1

The Brazilian coffee producers controlled three-fourth of the world’s coffee market by the beginning of the 20th century. This permitted them to manipulate the market. When the first overproduction crisis occurred in the early 20th century, Brazilian entrepreneurs realized that they could erect defense against the fall of prices. But they needed financial resources for keeping a part of the product away from the market. From 1893 a crisis, which was especially protracted in the U.S.A., forced coffee prices to fall in the world market. The average export value per bag in 1896 was £2.91 as opposed to £4.09 in 1893. In 1899, the price of coffee fell to £1.48. The problem of overproduction began to be felt from this time onward. Accumulating from year to year, it began to have an effect on prices. This had serious repercussions because it was threatening to cause permanent loss of income for the coffee producers as well as the nation. The ruling elites of the coffee-producing States therefore thought of withdrawing from the market a part of the production. The basis was established in the Taubate Agreement of 1906101. The idea was coined as a price-boosting policy. This consisted of the following measures: the Government was to intervene in the market and purchase the surplus. The aim was to reestablish the balance between supply and demand. Such buying would be financed by means of foreign loans. The servicing of such loans would be covered by a new tax to be levied in gold on every bag of coffee exported. The governments of the coffee-growing States would discourage further expansion of plantations. The first such scheme was put into operation under the leadership of Sao Paulo. It did not receive Federal Government support. The State Government appealed directly to the international sources of credit. The outcome was quite encouraging. The Federal Government then came up to take upon itself the major responsibility to carry out the task. This strengthened the political power of the coffee planters. This economic policy was shouldered by the Federal Government till 1930. With the advent of the world economic crisis, coffee production began to increase even further as the growers had continuously expanded plantations. The maximum production was attained in 1933 as a result of planting during 1927–28. It was impossible now to obtain finance credit from abroad. All the metal reserves of the government had also evaporated due to the flight of capital. The enormous stockpiling of 1929, fast selling of Brazilian metal reserves and the uncertain prospect of financing the large crop forecast for the near future – all hastened the decline of international coffee prices at the end of 1929. From September 1929 to September 1931, the prices fell from 22.5 cents to 8 cents a pound. However, internally at the consumer end in the United States, the price fell from 47.9 cents to 32.8 cents. Evidently the middlemen reaped a great profit. It was not enough to withdraw a part of the coffee production from the market. It was obvious that such surplus production had no possibility of being sold within some time. Production forecasts for the next ten years far exceeded the predictable absorption capacity of the market. Therefore, the only alternative open was destruction of the surplus crop. The reduction in monetary income in Brazil between 1929 and the rock-bottom point of depression was between 25% and 30%. This was quite small when compared 62


with the situation faced by other countries. In the U.S.A., the fall exceeded 50% despite the fact that the wholesale price index declined far less than those of coffee prices. The price decline in the U.S.A. entailed huge unemployment. In Brazil, the employment level was maintained despite the fact that production had to be destroyed. The value of production destroyed in Brazil was far lower than the amount of the real income created. Brazil was, in fact, constructing the famous pyramids which Keynes had envisaged some years later102. During the depression years, though monetary and real incomes declined, the relative price of imported goods increased. These two factors reduced the demand for imports. The increasing importance of the internal demand as a growing dynamic factor can be realized, especially during this stage of depression. Since the internal demand remained steadier than the demand abroad, the sector which was producing for the internal market now attracted more investment. The coffee economy, because of its precarious nature in the time of depression that necessitated physical destruction of the stock, however, frightened capital away. The capacity of production was halved for the next 15 years. Replacement investment being restricted, a part of the capital integrated with coffee was now disinvested. A substantial portion of this was now invested in cotton. In 1934, the value of cotton production amounted to 50% of the value of the coffee production whereas in 1929, it was only 10%. The dynamic factor in the post-crisis period was undoubtedly the domestic market. The activities connected with this sector not only grew but received further impulse by attracting capital generated or disinvested in the export sector. The domestic sector could not increase productive capacity, especially industrial, without importing machinery and equipment which became costlier as a result of depreciation of currency. However, attempts were made for intensive utilization of the available production capacity. The output of the textile sector rose substantially in the post-crisis years without any further input from abroad. Thus a higher rate of profit on the invested capital yielded internally generated resources which in turn helped in subsequent expansion. Seocnd-hand machinery at very low prices were then imported. Some of the largest industries established in Brazil during the depression years were based on equipment from plants which had closed in countries hit hardest during the depression. Rapid and vigorous recovery ensued. Industrial output grew by about 50% between 1929 and 1937. Primary production for the domestic market increased by more than 40%. Notwithstanding the depression imposed on Brazil from without, the aggregate income rose by 20% between these years, implying 7% per capita increase. It was quite an achievement considering the fact that in the U.S.A. during the same period, the per capita income had declined substantially. The rise in the foreign exchange rate reduced the buying power of the Brazilian currency abroad by almost half. The situation in 1938–39 was identical with that of the most crucial period of the crisis. That period had permitted a substantial relative scaling down of prices of merchandise produced domestically and it was on the basis of relative prices that the industrial development of the 1930s took place. The formation of a single market for internal producers and importers, as a natural consequence of the relative expansion of the sector associated with the 63

CHAPTER 1

domestic market, transformed the exchange rate into an instrument of enormous importance to the entire economic system. The consequences of the increase in the buying power of the Brazilian currency abroad meant lower prices in cruzeiros for exported goods. Since the international price of coffee was set by agreement, valorization of the currency implied increasing losses in the coffee sector. The counterpart of the process was a reduction in prices of imported goods. Domestic producers, therefore, were seriously concerned at the possibility of sudden imports at a price level far lower than that prevailing in the market. Thus the interests of both the exporting and industrial sectors joined forces to oppose revalorization of the currency abroad. This is the reason why the Brazilian government froze the exchange rate. The economy in the beginning of the 1940s started from a situation in which the productive capacity associated with the domestic market was being intensively utilized. The index of export prices grew by 75% between 1937 and 1942. It means that there was considerable export stimulus. By freezing the exchange rate, the Government was boosting the monetary income of the export sectors at a time when supply of imported products had fallen by more that 40 per cent. The contrast is quite apparent. Between 1929 and 1933, the combined effect of stabilization of the export quantum and the lowering of the prices of exported products induced a reduction in the monetary income provided by exports to the extent of approximately 35%, notwithstanding the devaluation of the currency. Between 1937 and 1942, the same factors caused an increase of about 45% in the monetary income generated by the export sector. The reduction in import quantum during the same period was 43%. The situation during the World War years was of extreme complexity. There was a need for action far wider in scope than mere exchange manipulation. The economy was subjected to excessive strain. The government was increasing its expenditures for military purposes. This reduced still further that part of the national product which was intended for meeting the needs of consumers and investors. There was a decline in productivity due to the War. Meanwhile, the flow of income continued to grow. The external sector generated a mass of buying power which increased with the rise in international prices. The Government was paying a huge wage bill. In the private sector lower productivity did not reduce the wage bill. The Brazilian economy had recovered by its own efforts during the 1930s. The per capita income in 1937 was accompanied by a sharp rise in prices. The general price level which had increased by 31% from 1929 to 1939, rose by 86% between 1940 and 1944. The mass of income created in the export sectors was left without a real counterpart as imports fell off. The difference between export and import was 2800 million cruzeiros. The economy continued to produce coffee in quantities which was more than could be placed abroad or consumed internally. Coffee stockpiles in 1942 amounted to 1,000 million cruzeiros. There was a Government deficit of 1,500 million cruzeiros. It was a huge base for growth of the banking sector, which increased by 60% between 1942 and 1943. The total quantity of goods and services increased by only 2% whereas the flow of income rose by 63%. When a sudden 64


process of price rise takes place, the entrepreneurs acquire considerable capital gains. Between 1939 and 1944, export prices rose by 110% as against a hike of 98% in domestic prices. Between 1929 and 1944, import prices rose by 64% whereas the domestic price level rose by 98%. Between 1944 and 1949, import prices rose by 36% whereas the domestic price level rose by 70%. The practical consequence of the growing disparity was the subversion of the relative price level which had served as a basis for Brazilian industrial development from the 1930s. The domestic price level, if compared with the import price level during 1929 and 1939, saw a relative rise in the prices of about 60% of the imported goods. On the basis of the price parity, the Brazilian economy was developing. Between 1939 and 1949, the opposite process occurred. The price level within Brazil rose by comparison with the import price level. Hence there was a revalorization of the Brazilian currency, scarcely concealed by the exchange control system. Imports were liberalised in the post-war years. The external supply became regular. Hence, there was a tendency on the part of the consumers to revert to the relative level of expenditures on imported commodities which were available at competitive prices. However, such a situation was incompatible with the existing import capacity. The capacity was identical to that of 1929 whereas the aggregate income had increased by about 50%. It was natural, therefore, that the urge to import displayed by the population tended to suppress, to a great extent, the actual possibilities of payment abroad. The possible solution was either to devaluate the currency or establish a series of selective import controls. The decision to adopt the latter was of much significance. This heralded the intensification of the country’s process of industrialization. The practical consequences of the newly adopted exchange policy intended for fighting the rise in prices was a relative reduction in imports of finished consumer goods, to the benefit of capital goods and raw materials. The industrial sector was thus doubly favoured; on one hand, competition was reduced through import control. On the other hand, raw materials and machineries could be acquired at relatively low prices. Thus an extremely favourable situation for industrialization arose. The situation was responsible for the rise in investment rate and intensification of growth during the post-war period. Whereas the general level of price went on rising, capital goods could be purchased abroad practically at constant prices. Between 1945 and 1950, the price level of imports rose by 7% whereas that of domestically produced manufactures rose by 54% cent. It can be understood why import of equipment rose by 338% between 1945 and 1951 whereas total imports increased by 83%. The industrial sector did not retain the whole benefit for itself. The industries transferred a part of the resultant improvement to the population as a whole through a relative lowering of prices. POLITICAL

I Portugal claimed its stake in the new world – a stake recognized in the bulls of Pope Alexander VI and confirmed by the Treaty of Tordesillas. It was formally 65

CHAPTER 1

claimed by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500. A thin slice of what is now Brazil – the line of demarcation cutting through Para in the North and Santa Catarina in the South – was claimed by Portugal by the early 16th century. But over time, as Spain was preoccupied with exploitation of the riches of Peru, Portugal pushed itself far west of the line and gradually laid claim to a domain that constituted half of South America. Pedro Alvares Cabral, as disclosed by official records103, was blown off the searoute to India and this brought him to the coast of the Americas in 1500. Cabral’s men probed the jungle and found a strange tree. Its wood was as red as live coal. It was similar to the dye wood imported from the Far East, long known as ‘Brazil’. The new land thus got its name. In 1501, Portugal sent three ships to explore the coast south of Natal. In 1503, another expedition under Gonzalo Coelho was undertaken with Amerigo Vespucci as one of the captains. Spending months probing the inland, detailed notes were made by the crew of the flora, fauna and the human settlements of the region. Though preoccupied with the Asian trade, Portugal did not wholly neglect Brazil. The primary impetus was commercial. Europe’s expanding textile industry clamoured for dyes. A royal commission authorized Fernao de Noronha, a converted Jew of Lisbon, to gather the red brazilwood and transport the same to Lisbon. The royalty paid to the king by the merchant was quite handsome. The French, too, exhibited a lively interest in Brazil. French ships went round the Brazilian coast, collected some brazilwood and raided Portuguese ships. Portugal retaliated. It then posted a small garrison at Pernambuco in 1521. The French struck back and destroyed the outpost in 1530. This made Portugal more cautious. Portugal’s India trade was languishing by 1510. Though Portugal made fabulous profit by trading in spices and textiles, the cost of manpower was high. The European market was glutted and price fell sharply. During this time Spain had gained enormous riches from the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Spain was too eager to get a slice out of the Portuguese possessions too. All these factors contributed to Portugal’s consolidation of its possessions. In 1533, John III, in a bid to control effectively the possessions introduced the system of captaincies. The recipient of this favour was responsible for enlistment of settlers, promotion of farming and trade, looking after the religious activities and protection of his area against the marauders. All costs for such activities would be borne by the recipient. Each captaincy consisted of a strip of twenty five to sixty leagues wide along the coast and extended inland to the line set by the Treaty of Tordesillas. In 1553, a captain-general was appointed. Bahia became the capital of Brazil. Thus the area came under a central command with a headquarters. By 1580, Brazil had eight well-established captaincies. The new colony could also boast of 60 sugar mills; with a population of 25,000 Portuguese, 18,000 indigenous people and 14,000 black slaves. Brazil was then exporting sugar, brazilwood and cotton. In 1580, the Spanish King Philip II seized the Portuguese throne. For 60 years, from 1580 to 1640, Spain yielded one substantial advantage to Brazil. Believing that Brazil would remain in Spanish possession forever the new rulers were quite 66


lax in blocking Brazilian occupation beyond the line of Tordesillas. In 1640, thanks to Spain’s preoccupation with European wars, Portugal regained its freedom under John IV, the first of the Braganza dynasty. In 1555, several hundred French colonists under Nicolas Durand de Villeganon, established themselves in the bay of Rio de Janeiro with the objective of creating an ‘Atlantic France’. However, in 1580, the Portuguese, led by Mem de Sa,’ evicted the intruders. The Dutch were more successful. They had long served as carriers of the Portuguese between Brazil and Portugal. In 1604, a Dutch fleet attacked Bahia. In 1630, the Dutch seized Recife and Olinda in Pernambuco. Then, finally, they held the territory covering a coastal distance of twelve hundred miles. The Dutch had dedicated allies in the colony. The Jews befriended them. Many blacks and Indians were convinced of their generosity. The Dutch had an able administrator John Maurice of Nassau. In 1654, they withdrew from Pernambuco. With the ascendancy of the Braganzas on the Lisbon throne, some changes were brought about in the colonial administration. An overseas council was assigned large powers over Brazil. There were numerous changes in the original captaincies. In 1710, the captaincy of Sao Paulo was created. Then, in 1720, was created the captaincy of Minas Gerais. Portugal evolved as a truly Imperial power during the reign of Joseph I (1750–77) who appointed the Marquis of Pombal as his Prime Minister. He ruled as a dictator from 1751 to 1777. His boundless energy led him to take drastic measures, wise and unwise, at home and in Brazil. His chief target was the Jesuits who were stripped off their land and wealth and banished from Brazil and Portugal in 1759. Pombal reorganised public services, promoted establishment of schools, reformed agriculture and encouraged industry. He freed education from the control of the clergy. Enlightened beyond his time, he considered slavery an evil and abolished it in Portugal. He also abolished Indian slavery in Brazil. During his period, the Brazilian capital was shifted from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. II

Pedro I severed Brazil’s ties with Portugal by his grito de Ypiranga in 1822. He was fortunate to have Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva as his Prime Minister. Bonifacio, who was fifty seven in 1822, was born in Sao Paulo and educated at the University of Coimbra. He worked and taught for thirty years in Portugal. Considered the father of Brazil, he was a well known mineralogist and friend of such luminous scientific personalities as Humboldt, Volta, Priestley and Lavoisier. He was also a poet. After he returned to Brazil in 1819, he shaped the events in that country in such a manner that Brazil was peacefully separated from Portugal. He favoured a constitutional monarchy and staked his hope on John’s young nineteen-year old son Pedro whom he persuaded to remain in Brazil against the wishes of Lisbon. Immediately thereafter, he urged Pedro to declare Brazil’s independence. Although he opposed slavery, he advised its gradual abolition. 67

CHAPTER 1

The young Pedro, due to his inexperience and arrogance, encountered a host of obstacles. He angered many Brazilians by appointing quite a number of Portuguese to high offices. Such measures were construed as anti-Brazilian as many suspected that Portugal was harbouring the ambition of monopolizing the Brazilian trade. Pedro’s first confrontation with the Brazilians came about in 1823. He appointed some able and patriotic Brazilians to draft a constitution that year. Pedro did not approve of the draft and appointed a Council of State to write another. This constitution, unlike the former democratic one, conferred the ‘moderative power’ upon the Emperor; the Emperor also had the right to nominate senators for life in the upper house of the Parliament. The Emperor had the right to convoke the Parliament and veto its acts. However, the Judiciary was declared neutral. The constitution was highly centralist. After a series of fiascos, both personal and political, the Brazilians had enough of Pedro. He was too Portuguese for their taste, too arrogant and too expensive. In 1831, Pedro signed his abdication and set sail for Portugal where he died in 1834 at the age of 36. The Empire now rested in the hands of five-year old Pedro II. He was endowed with a formidable ancestry. His forbears, the Braganzas, the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs were kings and emperors of Spain, Portugal, France and England. In 1831, he could not remember his mother and his father had just left for Portugal. For nine years, education of Pedro was a national undertaking. Jose Bonifacio, his first tutor, served for two years. He was followed by the Marquis of Itanhaen, an able, austere, and deeply religious person. Numerous teachers taught him over the years. By the time Pedro was fourteen, he had studied history, geography, Latin, French, English, German and the natural sciences. He learnt piano, dancing, art and horsemanship. He read a vast lot and acquired firm habits of study which prepared him to be the best-educated ruler of nineteenth century Latin America. During the nine years (1831–40), Brazil witnessed a number of rebellions: in 1831 in northern Para; in 1833 in Minas Gerais; in 1834 in Mato Grosso and Maranhao. In 1834, the constitution was modified to create provincial legislatures. These acted as safety valves for disgruntled minorities. Further reforms were carried out. But these did not fully quieten the nation. There was a slave revolt in Bahia in 1835; a ten-year war of secession in Rio Grande do SuI (1835–45) and a new series of revolts in Maranhao. In 1840, being urged by the liberals, Pedro accepted the responsibility of the state. Pedro’s administration looked like an English parliamentary system. A Prime Minister selected the cabinet, nominally answerable to the Chamber of Deputies which was controlled by the Emperor. Two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, assumed power alternatively. Over this system Pedro exercised his ‘power of mediation’, conferred by the Constitution of his father. However, there was no significant middle class to voice their demands. The illiterate, inarticulate proletariat did not have the right to vote. The electorate constituted of a few thousand landowners, priests, businessmen etc. Pedro held the whip. Many claim that Pedro furnished as much democracy as immature Brazil could absorb. 68


Pedro’s 49-year rule could be divided into three distinctive periods: 1) suppression of civil wars, 2) relationship with neighbouring countries and 3) growth of liberal, and democratic ideas leading to creation of a Republican Brazil. The 1840s was a decade of pacification. Revolts in Maranhao were suppressed in 1841; the 10-year-old civil war was finally crushed in Rio Grande do Sul in 1845. The uprising in Pernambuco was put down in 1849. British recognition of Brazilian independence came in 1826 with the promise that slavery would be abolished by 1830. But instead of declining, the slave trade flourished even after 1830. This increased British pressure on Brazil. In 1845, the British parliament declared that henceforth Brazilian slave-ships seized on the high seas would be subject to arbitration by British courts. For five years the British seized Brazilian slave-ships. Shipments increased also. In 1847, 1848 and 1849, 50,000 new slaves were unloaded each year. In 1850, British cruisers entered Brazilian harbours and captured some slave ships. There were minor incidents in the Brazilian ports involving British ships. In June 1863, Brazil broke off relations with Britain. During the civil war in the U.S.A., Brazil’s relations with Washington were strained as Brazil declared neutrality and granted concession of belligerent rights to the confederate States. The most important confrontation with neighbours was the war of Triple Alliance in which Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay attacked Paraguay which was experimenting with the formation of an egalitarian society. The war continued for five years in which 50,000 Brazilians died. The 1850s were marked by a burst of economic prosperity. Stock-breeding in the South was increasing. Pernambuco and Bahia were producing more sugar, tobacco and cotton. Production of all the commodities except gold and diamond was on the rise. A few industries were established in the province of Rio de Janeiro. The chief leader of this new economic expansion was Irineu Evangelista de Souza, the Baron of Maua, (1813–89). A self-made man, he was nicknamed the Baron of Industries. He built a banking empire and helped finance Brazil’s war. He built railroads, roads, ports, canals all over Brazil. He introduced shipping lines. He initiated gas lighting of Rio streets, laid telegraph lines and transatlantic cables and built textile mills. His was the first effective voice against the colonial economy. He favoured tariffs for protecting industry. For 30 years, Pedro II shaped a Brazil that was very different from that of his predecessors. During this period he had the affectionate respect of the people. From 1870 onwards he began to lose grip on the course of events in Brazil. The first conflict was with the church. He was quite liberal in religious tolerance. He respected the sincerity of the Protestants, the Jews and the Mormons. He admired the heretics. He found inspiration among the Unitarians and Quakers. The controversy which soured his relations with Rome was the issue of the Freemasons. When the Pope pronounced a ban upon Freemasonry in 1865, Pedro refused to have the encyclical published in Brazil. His conciliatory attitude alienated him from both the clerical establishment and the freemasons. Then he got involved in a conflict with the army. Guns and marching men bored him. The Paraguayan war brightened the image of the military. The army was willing 69

CHAPTER 1

to take an active part in the affairs of the country. Although Pedro was willing to meet their fair demands, he could not swallow the political ambition of the men in uniform. The abolition of slavery was the third point of contention. On assuming power in 1840, he freed his own slaves. In 1866, when the Benedictine Order of Rio freed 1,600 slaves, Pedro made a call upon this abbot to congratulate him. Pedro’s daughter Isabel and her French husband were active abolitionists. In 1871, a movement led by Nabuco de Araujo, Viscount Rio Branco and Joaquim Nabuco took action. The Emperor was then in Europe. But no one doubted his support of the measure adopted by the Parliament and signed by Isabel, Pedro’s regent. The crusade for the Republic was formally launched in 1870 with the founding of the Rio de Janeiro newspaper A Republico. It carried the Republican manifesto in its first issue. Pedro never disputed the right of the Republicans to vent their sentiments. He himself appointed one of the ablest leaders of the positivists, Benjamin Constant, tutor for his grandson. The Rio Branco law was a gradual way to free the slaves. It declared that all children born to slave mothers should be free. The law affected 1,700, 000 persons thus born. The antislavery society became highly active. Local movements abolished slavery in the northern State of Ceara in 1883 and in Amazonia in 1884. Many slaves were freed in Rio Grande do Sul. In 1888 slavery was abolished in Brazil. The stage was now set to get rid of Pedro. He had infuriated all the conservative elements. The liberals wanted the Republic. Now the army struck. General Manoel Deodoro da Fonseca, Benjamin Constant and Floriano Peixoto presented an ultimatum to Pedro to abdicate. He did so and left for Europe where he died in 1891. III

It was a veritable coup that transferred power from the hands of the Emperor to the military. Deodoro da Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto took over power from the civilian Government. They had the approval of the propertied classes. Although the generals professed Republicanism to seize power, there were genuine Republicans among the civilians who supported the move. Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhaes and Ruy Barbossa were genuine positivists for whom the Republic was the dream come true. The Republic was now ruled by the generals. Deodoro da Fonseca was the de facto dictator. By decree was created the United States of Brazil. The ties between the Church and the State were severed. A commission was chosen to write a Republican constitution. The new charter came into force in 1891. It was fashioned after the Constitution of the United States. The same distribution of power among the executive, the judiciary and the legislative branches was provided. The States were to control their own affairs. They could impose duties on goods coming from the other States. The national chief executive could impose a ‘state of seize’ at will, intervene in any State’s internal affairs and supplant elected governors. 70


After several years of dictatorship marked by internal trouble and virtual civil war, the army transferred power to Prudente Jose de Moraes Barros. It was a relief after five years of confusion. Prudente, a Paulista, was caught between the power struggle between the military and civilian factions. Despite these handicaps, he made some headway and achieved substantial progress during the first couple of years in office. Then he had to tackle a revolt in the Sertao region. The armed forces were dispatched to crush the rebellion of Antonio Maciel, a strange zealot nicknamed ‘Conselheiro’. Euclides de Cunha immortalized the resistance of the followers of Conselheiro in the novel ‘Os Sertoes’. Prudente took leave of office in 1898. The next 12 years were the most constructive period in the history of the Republic. Three able men served in the presidency: Manuel de Campos Salles, 1898–1902; Francisco de Paula Rodrigues Alves 1902–1906; and Affonso Pena, 1906–9. The first two were Paulistas and the third a Mineiro. It was a period of peace, economic recovery, constructive international agreements, physical rebuilding of the capital and fight against diseases. Provisions of the constitution were generally respected. President Campos Salles had an able Finance Minister, Joaquim Murtinho whose methods were spartan and effective. He withdrew and burnt much paper money, imposed rigid control on credits and improved the economy of the Government. During these years, Brazil won prestige in the family of nations, thanks to the Baron of Rio Branco. He spent thirty years in England and Germany and was well-versed in European affairs. He helped strengthen Brazil’s relations with the U.S.A. The next two decades saw five presidents: Hermes da Fonseca, 1910–14; Wenceslau Braz 1914–18; Epitacio da Silva Pessoa, 1919–22; Arthur Bernardes 1922–26; and Washington Luiz Perreira de Souza, 1926–30. Three perennial problems dogged them - the interference of the armed forces, anarchic regionalism and a stumbling economy. A fourth complication arose due to the outbreak of the World War I. The army, held in check for a dozen years, came to dominate Brazilian politics in 1910. The presidential campaign was a contest between soldiers and civilians. The men in uniform supported the candidature of Hermes who was opposed by the liberal candidate Ruy Barbossa. In an election manipulated by the army, Hermes won. The first truly national party ‘The Civilistas’ was launched by Ruy Barbossa in 1910. State loyalty still prevailed over allegiance to the nation. Each State had a political machine and a party chieftain. Those of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais were the most dominant. They passed the office of presidency back and forth between them.These two states furnished all but two of the presidents who served during the first forty years of the Republic. In 1914, Wenceslau Braz Perreira Gomes, a conservative Mineiro took the office of the President. It is generally believed that he was an honest man. As the War broke out, Brazil’s economy faced an enormous crisis. The prices of coffee and rubber fell in the international market. German submarines were blocking trade and sinking ships. Internally, Brazil was sharply divided. Many people, including the cultured upper strata, sided with the Allies. Most of the Italians supported the Americans. But there were elements who were openly pro-German – especially those living in 71

CHAPTER 1

the southern provinces. In 1917, after repeated sinking of Brazilian ships and entry of the United States into the War, Brazil revoked its neutrality and declared war on Germany – the only South American nation to have done it. The war years finally brought prosperity. By 1917, despite German attacks, Brazil’s sales of beans increased four hundred times, sugar six times and chilled beef ten times. In 1918, Brazil took part in the Versailles Peace Conference where its representative Epitacio Pessoa asserted his country’s place among the world powers. In 1924, an episode marked the emergence of the Communist movement in Brazil. Luiz Carlos Prestes, an army Captain, recruited an expeditionary force of enthusiastic rebels. For two years they journeyed over the interior, south to the Parana, north to the Sao Francisco, west towards the lowlands of Bolivia. This adventure has been recounted most lyrically by Jorge Amado. For some years the exploits of the Prestes band caught the imagination of the people of the nation and inspired songs in every village. In this long march Prestes discovered the intense poverty of the caboclos. The long march came to an end in Mato Grosso. Prestes went into exile - to Moscow. There was a brief relief under Washington Luiz Perreira de Souza (1926–30). Coffee prices improved and the military gave the civilians a respite. Freire’s father who served in the military police during this period was totally disillusioned with the Government. In 1930, Brazil was caught in the worldwide depression. As the election approached in 1930, Washington Luiz made a political blunder by choosing a fellow Paulista Julio Prestes as his successor, ignoring a Mineiro. The infuriated Mineiros threw their support in favour of Getulio Vargas of Rio Grande do Sul. The election, controlled by Washington Luiz, declared Prestes elected. The disaffected Mineiros, Gauchos and Paulistas conspired to reverse the scenario. A formidable body of army officers and politicians moved to Rio de Janeiro, removed Washington Luiz from office and placed Vargas in the presidential palace. His advent marked the end of the First Republic and the beginning of fifteen years of dictatorship. IV

Vargas, says Gilberto Freyre, must be understood against the landscape and heritage of Rio Grande do Sul; he was spiritually akin to the Jesuit missionary fathers who shaped the religious and cultural life of the area. Like them, he was silent, introspective, subtle, realistic, distant and cold. This 47-year-old man, trained first for the army, then for the Law, served as Minister of Treasury under Washington Luiz and, then as governor of his own State. He ruled for 15 years by playing State against State, group against group and man against man - always with a smile. Vargas’ first two years in office inspired confidence among the Brazilians. He made it amply clear that state loyalties must yield to national unity. He imposed a rigid censorship, removed elected state officials and posted his own chosen men as governors and mayors. The Government of the country was now truly in Rio de Janeiro and in the hands of Getulio Vargas. His economic policy was wise, vigorous and audacious. He imposed new taxes, removed ridiculous tariff barriers between the States, encouraged creation of new 72


industries, optimized coffee production and marketing and declared a moratorium on foreign loans. Vargas showed great political acumen in 1932. The State of Sao Paulo had demanded a return to the constitutional order that had been set aside by the first acts of the Vargas Government. Berthold Klinger, the former Chief of Police, rallied 30,000 troops of the State. Vargas showed his ability for compromise. On one hand, he prepared the federal troops for an eventual confrontation, and on the other, offered a comfortable retirement scheme for the leaders of the uprising. Once the rising was contained, he carefully avoided taking any reprisals against Sao Paulo. He declared that he would provide the constitution people demanded. Later on, when the city of Sao Paulo opened the Avenida de Julio, commemorating their unsuccessful uprising, Vargas himself participated in the ceremony. Vargas convened a Constituent Assembly in 1933 which prepared the Constitution of 1934. It resembled the Constitution of 1891. The new Constitution reinforced national unity by vesting larger power in the hands of chief executive, provided for social legislation to safeguard labourers in the fields and factories and granted suffrage to women. The Assembly then named Vargas President for four years. In November 1935, the third infantry regiment, stationed in the capital, hoisted the red flag and their example was followed by a number of officers of the Air Force Academy. They had hoped that all the garrisons in Rio Grande do Sul would follow their example. But this did not happen. This Communist uprising of 1935 proved to be abortive. It lasted only a single night but the consequences were more serious. After this incident Vargas proscribed the This Communist Party in Brazil Its leader Luis Carlos Prestes, was arrested and sentenced to 46 years of imprisonment. A group called Integralists had been growing rapidly since 1934. Its leader was a neurotic zealot called Plinio Salgado. He spoke of Sun worship, Italian Fascism, anti-semitism and ‘leadership’. His several hundred supporters wore green shirts, gave a distinctive salute, used the Greek sigma as their identifying mark and exalted ‘God, Nation, Family’. The followers of the Integralists spread into the Army, Navy and Government offices. The next Presidential election was set for January 1938. Three forces dominated the campaign: Vargas, who was constitutionally ineligible for election; the Communists, whose leader was in the prison and the Integralists, the most numerous of all the parties. Vargas declared an emergency of ninety days in October. He claimed that the Communists were preparing for an uprising. Then in November Vargas struck. He proclaimed himself President for another term, dissolved Congress, and announced a new constitution for the ‘Novo Estado’ or the New State. Now, Vargas named all officials – high and low. His social programme, launched by decree, guaranteed collective bargaining. The new constitution promised an eight-hour day, restriction on night duty and child labour, medical assistance for worker and expectant mothers, etc. The slogan ‘Brazil for Brazilians’ had a nationalistic tinge. Foreign enterprises were caught in a tangle of new regulations. His was a ‘disciplined democracy’. Civil liberties were curtailed. The Press, radio and educational institutions came under censorship. Foreign correspondents were debarred from sending unauthorized despatches. 73

CHAPTER 1

Vargas utilized the services of able men – even those who differed with his policies. Afranio de Mello Franco, his Minister of Foreign Affairs during the first three years, belonged to the fine tradition of Brazilian international lawyers. He was a delegate to the League of Nations and a judge at the Hague. In 1933, he represented Brazil at the seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo. Oswaldo Aranha, ambassador to the U.S.A., was another useful colleague. He became President of the Assembly of the United Nations. Candid, open, friendly, he was Vargas’ most effective spokesman. Aranha was always on the side of the Allies. Cynical bystanders described him as ‘Vargas’ American Front’. Vargas has been rightfully credited for his efforts to improve the living conditions of the people. He made some headway in providing better housing, more medical care, and increased wages. The War brought a brief period of prosperity as the demands for Brazilian goods increased. Industries whose number multiplied during and after World War II got a boost. Total industrial outlay in 1907 was around U.S. $35 million; in 1920, it was U.S. $153 million; in 1940, U.S. $ 1300 million. The industrial output multiplied by 43 times over 36 years. Textile, paper, rubber goods, leather, cement and machinery all registered a rise. Vargas built the Volta Redondo steel plant which was a novelty for a third world nation. The swamplands in the State of Rio de Janeiro were drained for farming. Highways and railroads were extended. In 1938, Vargas launched the National Petroleum Council. The National Council of Hydraulic and Electrical Energy was created in 1939 to exploit the vast unharnessed power of the rivers. Brazil’s trade registered a significant increase. During 1934–37, Brazil operated under a barter agreement with Germany. Locomotives, iron, coal, dyes were exchanged for Brazilian coffee, cotton, tobacco and oil. By 1937, Germany was selling twice as much to Brazil as Great Britain and half as much as the United States. During the initial phase of WorId War II, Vargas’ sympathy was unclear. His generals were cultivated by Germany. Many felt that Novo Estado resembled German and Italian models. He sent one of his sons to the U.S.A. and another to Germany and Italy. Vargas discouraged popular enthusiasm for the Allied cause. Even in January 1941, the newspaper Diario Carioca was closed for publishing an article in praise of Inter-American solidarity. When the Russians were defeating Germany, the Brazilian press made it appear that the Germans were still victorious. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, all the American nations got together. Vargas treaded the path very cautiously. In the month of January, 1942, Rio de Janeiro hosted a conference of the foreign ministers of all the Governments of North and South America. They took a unanimous decision to close the ranks against the Axis. On August 22, 1942 Brazil declared War against Germany. A military force of 25,000 men was sent to the Italian Front. By the beginning of 1945, there were clear signs of discontent in the country. Many politicians, military generals and professionals wanted change. In February that year, the newspapers were writing about Vargas’ promise to hold the elections. Democratic parties began to reorganize themselves. The National Democratic Union nominated Gomes. His candidature was supported by the liberals. The Social Democratic Party supported Dutra, Vargas’ Minister of 74


War. The Communists also entered the contest. In October 1945, Vargas dismissed the police chief of the capital and installed his own brother who was notorious as a dishonest and immoral person. The Generals demanded Vargas’ resignation. On October 28, 1945 Vargas resigned and flew to his firm in Rio Grande do Sul. V

General Enrico Dutra assumed office on January 31, 1946. Heavy, taciturn, unsmiling, colourless, Dutra the soldier proved to be an awkward man in politics. Though he was supported by Vargas, he was more conservative in approach than his predecessor. The Communist Party fought this election to become the fourth largest party with a total vote of 568,000 cast in its favour. Prestes was elected to the Senate. The lower house had fifteen communist deputies. In the congressional election of 1947, the Communists increased their representation still further. During this period the party was quite active in the labour unions. Alarmed at the rising influence of the Communists, Dutra banned the party in 1948. A Constitution drafted by Dutra was promulgated in 1946. It contained many social measures of Novo Estado. The Constitution also provided for direct election of the President for a five-year term. However, presidential power was curtailed. The Press became free. After the World War II, Brazil had an accumulation of about half a billion dollars in foreign credit. Politicians and businessmen resorted to reckless spending that pushed up inflation and reduced earnings in revenue. Prices shot up while wages lagged behind. Private entrepreneurs, mostly foreign, were awarded all sorts of projects – textile, cement, automobile, farm machinery, chemical, drugs, fertilizer, etc. The expansion of private investment was matched by enlarged federal investment in public works. Most of the foreign-owned railway lines were taken over by the Government and new tracks were laid. The steel plant at Volta Redonda was expanded. Development of the Amazon region started in right earnest. Hygienic conditions were sought to be improved. Planned expansion of hydroelectric projects were under way. Various other developmental schemes were also drafted. Running for office again in the 1950 presidential elections, Vargas travelled systematically all over Brazil. He won by an impressive margin. People voted him to see things changed. But things had changed enormously in a different direction over the last five years. Vargas now declared that Brazil would draw inspiration from the Scandinavian countries. A chronic economic crisis had gripped the nation. There was a combination of an endless outflow of capital, deficit in balance of payments, frost in the coffee plantations in Sao Paulo, speculation, a desperate drought in the North-east, and a rise in the cost of living. Vargas doubled the wages of the lowest-paid worker. He refused foreign capital investment in the Brazilian petroleum sector, – especially in exploration and exploittation. He tried to pass a law that would put a spanner on profits of the foreign companies – especially in remittance. He tried to cope with many enemies and many problems. In January 1954, the military leaders urged for dismissal of Joao Goulart, 75

CHAPTER 1

the Minister of Labour. Goulart had begun to transform the trade unions into a powerful workers’ movement. Shortly thereafter, the Generals warned Vargas of ‘demagogic politics’. The conflict between the President and the Army became sharper. On the dawn of August 24, 1954, after a night spent in deep thought, Vargas committed suicide. This created a tremendous effect on the Brazilian politics. Sobbing crowds came down from the favelas to kiss Getulio’s face. Thousands of people joined the funeral procession. Vargas left a letter for the nation. He wrote: “After so many years of domination and exploitation by international economic and financial cartels, I led a revolution and I won. I began the work of liberation and established the rule of freedom in the society. I had to abandon it. Then I was returned to power by the people. The clandestine campaign of the international cartels then became allied with that of the national groups fighting a regime which gave guarantees to the workers. The profits of foreign business rose to 500 per cent per year. I fought month after month, day by day, hour after hour, but they did not want the workers to be free. They did not want ordinary people to be independent. I have nothing left to give now but my blood. I was a slave to my people; I fought against exploitation of Brazil; I fought for the people; now I give my life”.104 Juscelino Kubitschek became the new President. During 1956–60, the term he was in the presidency, he showed that he carried the mantle of Vargas. Kubitschek was the founder of Brasilia, Brasil’s new capital. Construction of Brasilia was Kubitschek’s crowning glory as well as his reason for failure. The idea of transferring the capital dates back to 1853. In 1891, the possibility of such a change was embodied in an amendment of the Constitution. The first Constitution of the Republic actually stated the place where the future federal district was to be situated: on a plane of 14,000 square kilometers, at least 200 km from the present State capital Goiana. In 1934, a special government commission visited the area in order to settle on a precise site for the administrative buildings and the chamber of deputies. In 1953, exactly a hundred years after the idea had first been mooted, the Congress passed a law stating that the site chosen for Brasilia must have a good climate, be easily reached both by land and water, and have soil suitable for both building on and cultivation of vegetables. It was further stipulated that the future capital should spread over 5000 square kilometers and have about 500,000 inhabitants. Kubitschek’s victory in October 1955 came to many as a surprise. Against him was a coalition which, though oddly assorted, proved a match for all those who opposed Getulism. As the candidate of the social democrats, the workers and the Communists, he had all the conservatives and the right to the centre elements against him. A large part of the Army was hostile. However, in the end Kubitschen won by a margin of 400,000 votes over the conservative candidate Juarez Tavora. A careful study of the results made it clear that Vargas’ shadow loomed large in the election. Joao Goulart, leader of the Workers’ party, former Minister of Labour in the Vargas administration, got more vote for the vice-presidency than Kubitschek got for the presidency. The Pro-fascist Plinio Sagrado received 700,000 votes. Kubitechek’s greatest achievement – and disaster – was Brasilia. As he took office, he announced that he intended to cram fifty years into five. His first step 76


was to set up a state body to study and implement The Novacap (new capital) project. By October 1956, the work began. Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, pupils of Le Corbusier, and well known among rising young Brazilian architects, who had designed the amazing Ministry of Education building in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, with its revolutionary sun-visor and beehive construction, won the contract for building the capital. The future city had Dom Bosco as its patron saint. Lucio Costa began by tracing a cross on a blank sheet of paper. The horizontal axis, designed for residential areas, eventually became a curving line. From the sky the city looked like a bird. The vertical axis was given over to official and public buildings, ending in the symbolically named Square of Three Powers, where the ‘executive’ palace stands between two semi-circular areas - one designed for the Chamber and the Senate and the other for the Court of Justice. The city was built in a fantastically quick time: it took only three years for 50,000 workmen to finish the major work for the new capital. The palace in the Square of the Three Powers, the cathedral fashioned in the shape of an exotic flower, the palace of the Alvorada – all architectural masterpieces, poems in glass, steel and, concrete – were in place close to the artificial lake formed by drawing together the waters of half a dozen streams. On the state policy level, Kubischek carried on the Vargas line of benefiting the urban workers and the national bourgeoisie though he also tilted towards foreign capital. He stressed on an accelerated economic growth. Foreign capital inflow started vigorously (U.S. $ 743 million). This investment was mainly in the high profit consumer durables such as the newly developed motor vehicles industry. The concentration of foreign control in the most dynamic and capital intensive sectors of the economy not only made economic independence of Brazil more unlikely than ever, it also undermined and aggravated the contradiction between national capital aligned with foreign capital and the broad masses of the nation - both rural and urban. Therefore, national private capital rapidly lost to foreign capital in its competition to secure a strategic position in the economy. When the possibility of substituting home produced goods for imports was exhausted, private Brazilian companies and groups had no other alternative than to submit to foreign interests. The consequence of such a policy was increased productivity at the cost of employment. Wages were forced down, the market shrank, and the number of big enterprises declined. Because of monopoly or semi-monopoly conditions, the companies were still able to raise prices, regardless of the demand. By the early sixties, inflation was running at eighty to ninety percent a year and the domestic market saturated. In such a condition, the potential for class conflict was greatly enhanced. With the national bourgeoisie getting weakened and an increasing number of industrialists getting allied with the foreign capital, the workers were finding themselves in a precarious condition as both wages and jobs froze. The popular discontent grew. During the late fifties and the early sixties there was an upsurge of peasant movements. The Catholic Church organised rural unions to ameliorate the plight of the 77

CHAPTER 1

peasants. Some of the leading churchmen were quite vocal including Dom Herder Camara, the Archbishop of Recife. Kubitschek set up the Instituto Superior de Estudios Brasileiros (ISEB) which served as an official/academic forum for discussions on Brazilian development. Simultaneously, he started finalizing Government planning with the Programma de Metas (Target plan). Following the drought in 1958, funds for the North-east were channelled through the new ‘Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast’ (SUDENE) whose Director was Celso Furtado. Because it saw the need for structural changes and agricultural reforms, SUDENE was soon denounced as a hotbed of Leftist agitation. The next president was Janio Quadros, a puzzling and complex personality. He provoked numerous attacks during his brief six months in power. Quadros won his first victory in the election of the key post of Governor of Sao Paulo in 1954. He had defeated his rival Adhemar de Barros, the former governor, a truculent and dynamic politician. He fulfilled his new obligation with a great sense of responsibility. His austerity and efficiency impressed the people of Sao Paulo. It was without any real opposition that he won the election to the presidency in October 1960. He took possession of the Presidential palace in Brasilia in January 1961. However, the charm did not last more than half a year. On the following 25 August, the Brazilians were stupefied to learn that President Quadros had decided to resign. Quadros himself read out his letter of resignation to the people. His voice shook as he said “I feel myself destroyed. Hidden forces are even now mustering against me. Were I to remain the head of the Government, I should not be able to preserve the peace and tranquility I need to do the job. As I turn this page in my personal and public life, my thoughts go out to the students, the workers and the whole vast family of people who make up Brazil… …”.105 The man who was supposed to succeed Quadros was the Vice-President Joao Goulart. He was at the time touring China. Goulart had not been elected on the Quadros ticket but had run as second to Marshall Teixeira Lott, the candidate of the Workers’ Party. The fact that he was seen as Vargas’ political heir won him more votes than as Quadros’ number two. Having been vice-president in the Kubitschek administration, Goulart felt quite at home in the job under Quadros. As an aide to Vargas and a native of the same district in Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart founded his political fortunes on a close connection with the trade unions and the machinery of social security. At the moment of Quadros’ resignation, Goulart was delivering a courtesy speech in favour of the Communist regime in China; the expression he used in his toast to Chou En Lai, gave the Army an excuse they needed to veto his accession to the presidency. Goulart returned to Brazil post-haste and landed in Porto Alegre where his supporters were in a huge majority. Their anger against the military leadership was mounting alarmingly. Troops were sent by the Federal Government against the Third Army of General Machado Lopes who was supporting Goulart. But the military leaders and Goulart were wise enough to recoil at the thought of a civil war. A compromise formula emerged. Goulart would be made president, but would not 78


have the kind of presidential power enjoyed by Kubitschek or Quadros. Both houses of the legislature were summoned in Brasilia and they agreed on the plan. The compromise soon became quite inadequate to the needs of the country. Goulart, though officially president, had to work in harmony with the president of the council. He soon discovered that his position was quite vulnerable. He tried to fight against such amputation of presedential power. The administration in Brasilia came virtually to a standstill. The economic situation meanwhile deteriorated, the value of the cruzeiro fell, the cost of living sky-rocketed - all these resulted in a riot in Rio de Janeiro in June 1962. After the elections in October 1962, Kubitschek demanded a referendum to give Brazil its old form of presidential rule. In the referendum on 6 January 1963, the Brazilians by a vast majority decided to bring the old system back. This infuriated the conservatives and a section of the Army. Goulart endeavoured to restore the foreign policy of Quadros. He intensified relationship with the socialist countries and extended hands of friendship to newly emergent states of Africa and Asia. On the agricultural front, he tried to push through agrarian reforms. He planned to expropriate all the uncultivable land along the arterial roads, the railway lines and the dams up to a depth of ten kilometers. Some of these policies were announced by the President himself in large gatherings of workers and peasants. Leonel Brizola, the governor of Pernambuco and Miguel Arraes, the leader of the Left, stood by and supported such measures in a meeting held on March 13, 1964. On March 24, the Government decided to increase the salary of the civil servants by 50%. In the second-half of 1963, the Goulart Government found itself repeatedly deadlocked in battles with a Congress unwilling to cooperate with democratic solutions to change. The preceding two years saw the most extensive development of radical and revolutionary groups in Brazil. Goulart’s shift away from the balanced ‘positive left’ towards a more radical stance paved the way for the coup in 1964, claim some analysts. The PTB based Furtado-Dantes group had been entrusted with management of the economy and the introduction of an economic stabilization programme, after Goulart regained full presidential power. They proposed a foreign borrowing scheme, pruning of Government expenditure and a three-year plan to attack cultural bottlenecks involving agricultural reforms and offering of technical and financial assistance to the peasants. The package was not a simplistic effort to improve working class living standards. It involved basic reforms and nationalization of foreign communication and power firms. It tried to tread a middle path away from the extreme Right and the far Left. Goulart pigeon-holed the plan and moved closer to the far Left stance espoused by his brother-in-law Brizola. His incessant attacks on all sections of the Right alienated him from the petite bourgeois middle class. The military began to plot. Meanwhile, Goulart called for tax reforms, nationalization of foreign-owned property, rent control and other measures. After the arrest of 40 sailors allegedly for unionizing the Navy, another 1,000 Navy men rose in mutiny. Goulart refused to allow the naval authority to punish the erring men in uniform. 79

CHAPTER 1

In April 1964, the Army and the Navy together ousted Goulart. A regime of terror and repression took over. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DURING 1960s

The Brazilian economy underwent profound changes during the quarter of a century prior to 1960. Essentially a feudal nation specializing in the production of few tropical commodities, Brazil changed itself to a semi-industrialized economy. There took place a large concentration of population in urban areas. Out of an 80 million population, with a growth rate of 3.2 per cent, the urban quantum stood at 35 million and was poised for a higher growth. The Gross Internal Product stood at 30 billion U.S. dollars. Thus Brazil’s position was eleventh among the nations of the world. The per capita income being U.S. $ 382 in 1962, Brazil was at the top among the developing countries. Brazil, at this time, had a sufficiently large domestic market necessary for an autonomous industrial development. The essential characteristic of the post-war years was a steady substitution of locally manufactured products for imports. It was around 6.4% of the total value of Brazilian imports. The degree of industrial development made it possible to meet the demand of consumer goods by domestically produced goods and allowed investments based on internal supply of capital goods. Imports, however, continued to play a major role for acquiring the most advanced technology available in the industrialized countries. The nation’s level of domestic activity was no longer dependent upon the quantity and prices of the products exported. Post-War Development The post-war period was characterized by a rapid growth and important changes in the economic structure. Between 1947 and 1961, the average annual rate of growth was 5.8%. During the second half, there was a distinct rise in the rate of growth which was 7% between 1957 and 1961. This increase was essentially due to an extraordinary expansion of the industrial output. The output of consumer goods grew at the same percentage rate as the gross product. The reason was rapid expansion of capital goods industries. Between 1955 and 1961, while industrial production as a whole grew by 80%, the steel industries grew by 100%, mechanical industries by 125%, electrical and communication industries by 380% and transportation by as high as 600%.106 Problems of 1960s The social tensions that characterized the development of Brazil by the middle of the 1960s could be explained within the framework of a deeper analysis of the national historical process. The tension aggravated in Brazil due to intensification of the development process. The Brazilian institutional framework was established as a result of the secular process of growth of an economy almost entirely based on 80


the great estates producing the primary goods for export. Only three decades prior to the 1960s, the ruling class of Brazil was almost entirely composed of great landowners. The small urban population had limited political expression. The practice of slavery which lasted almost four centuries, gave way to a system in which labour relations were marked by a profound social differentiation between the employer and the employee. The representative system, constituted during the monarchical regime, continued under the republic. It was a top-down system. After 1930, the old semifeudal agrarian structure, which served as a prop for the political system, began to break up. With the decline of agricultural exports and the development of an urban industrial sector, new bases for political power emerged. The industrial entrepreneurs and workers’ organisations started participating in political movements. However, the effectiveness was somewhat reduced by the rigidity of the old institutional framework. The Federal system, providing for an exclusively large representation in the Congress of the less developed regions, contributed to the difficulties of the transitional process. On the other hand, incurporation of the working class into full political activity was made more difficult by the law that gave voting rights only to the literate minority. The greatest obstacle to a gradual transition lay in the fact that the most urgent reform which would give the system a greater capacity of self-adaptation, happened to be the most difficult to introduce. This was the political reform to increase the representation of the people’s organs. If this higher degree of democracy could be achieved, other changes could be introduced without excessive tension in the political system. The structural changes that had already taken place indicated that the most crucial phase of industrialization had been approached. The basic dynamic impulse could now be internally generated since the country was able to produce most of the equipment needed to maintain a high rate of growth. Economic Causes of the Crisis The Brazilian development in the 20th century is distinguished by the advent and progressive predominance of the factors favouring the formation of an industrially based capitalist economy. This industrial capitalism, however, was an outgrowth of a colonial economic structure. Therefore, it carried strong traces of mercantile development. The first three decades of the 20th century were a transitional phase in which dynamism of the exterior factors had been weakened. It was marked by the coffee crisis in Brazil. The withholding of large stocks and valorization schemes supported by overseas financiers were initiated in the first years of the century. Moreover, the short-lived Amazonian rubber boom, together with the development of other export items of limited significance such as cocoa and mate, kept hidden the true nature of the crisis that gripped the national economy. The ruling class of the period thought of economic policy only in order to ‘mend’ the country, to re-establish the schemes that had formerly worked. During these three decades, Brazil’s exports increased less in comparison to the growth in population as well as the growth in urban 81

CHAPTER 1

population which was closely committed to the export economy. On the other hand, a growing share of export earnings was being used to meet the external debt, contracted chiefly to support the coffee valorization policy. The coffee economy disintegrated after 1930. The world economic crisis of 1929 and the overproduction of coffee in 1931 resulted in a collapse of the coffee economy. This situation continued till 1945. On the political front changes took place which managed to keep groups directly connected to coffee export out of power. New ruling elements, under the dictatorship of Vargas, who were less committed to the overseas market, initiated a more realistic policy conditioned less by the ideology of the coffee producers. A phase of ‘political realism’ which made an attempt to counter severe economic ills with drastic cures - being less concerned with maintaining a consistent attitude and unaware of the consequences of such measures was observed. This is exactly the period when industrial capitalism was enforced and consolidated in Brazil. No one should have any illusion that the predominance of the industrial capitalists was caused by an open conflict with the traditional, more or less feudalistic, ruling classes. The fact was that industrial capitalism began to make a significant initial progress when the colonial economy began to disintegrate; its leaders were abandoning their previous ideological position to dedicate themselves to an improvised political opportunism. During the transition from a ‘colonial’ to an industrial economy, the archaic superstructure remained unaltered despite emergence of new productive forces which sought expression in the political sphere. As already stated, the crisis was not an outcome of an antagonism between the incipient productive forces and the superseded ideologies of the ruling class. The decadent ‘colonial’ economy did not encounter any rivalry from the newly developing system. The decadence was simply due to weakening of the external stimuli. There was no indigenous development in the country that conflicted with the interests of the exporting sector. With the collapse of the ‘colonial’ economy, the country entered a phase of irreversible structural changes. The policy of defending the coffee economy continued despite the impossibility of gaining any external support. Huge stocks of coffee were built up. Around 80 million bags were physically destroyed in a ritual of political realism that lasted for more than a decade. The objective was to provide relief to the coffee growers by transferring to the bulk of the population the losses that would otherwise be concentrated in the coffee growing sector. The practical effect of the policy was much wider. What happened was that the level of employment in other sectors was defended although the capacity to import was declining. Thus one of the side effects of the ‘realistic’ defense of the coffee sector was the creation of highly favourable conditions for investment in the home market. From this point began the process of industrialization which led to the final collapse of the ‘colonial’ economy. Industrialization, which supported a new capitalist class, was caused by the crisis in the colonial economy and by the way in which this economy had attempted to defend itself and was not itself a causative factor in the crisis. Many years passed before the changes that had taken place in the economic structure were recognized and a policy aimed at consolidation of industrialization 82


taken up. Nevertheless, the political opportunism of the new rulers, far less rigid in their ideological outlook, than the Mineiros and the Paulistas, indirectly paved the way for industrialization. A dynamic centre, based on the domestic market was created. From now onwards, the Brazilian economy did not depend on the external stimuli for its growth. To start with, the Brazilian industrialization sought to replace imports. At a later stage, the need arose to satisfy the demand created by the development itself; i.e., satisfy the demand for capital goods. The formation of industrial capitalism required an ample accumulation process. The maintenance of a high level of income during the depression in the external sector increased the competitive capacity of existing industrial activities which were established at a time when they could be indirectly protected by successive depreciation of the Brazilian currency. The depreciation operated as a mechanism for socializing the losses of the exporting sector during periods of depression for primary products in the world market. During the period between 1929 and 1937, industrial output increased by 50 per cent while imports declined by 23 per cent. This expansion of industrial output was made possible due to an intensive utilization of existing capacities and by importing a certain number of equipment, mostly second-hand, offered at reduced prices during depression. The intensive utilization of productive capacity, including the labour force which worked two or three shifts, was paralleled by a relative rise in the prices paid by the consumer. This facilitated a greater return on investment. The first wave of inflation, caused by the purchase of coffee stocks for accumulation and destruction, operated as a mechanism for transferring income to the industrial sector, creating the conditions for ample accumulation. This accumulation was reinforced by the spontaneous transfer of resources from the exporting sector whose rate of profit was on the decline. During the period of the three decades starting from 1930, industrialisation was supported by the convergence of two factors: substitution of imports and transfer of resources caused by inflation. During the first phase of substitution of imports, the objective was to fill in the gap. In view of the collapse of the import capacity, imported goods had become relatively more expensive. Domestic products, hitherto neglected because of their inferior quality or higher price, began to be accepted in the market. In other cases, demand was deflected to similar products, as was the case with overseas tourism. Expansion of certain domestic lines of production had its effect on the composition of demand for imports since it created the need to import intermediary products, raw materials and equipment. Once the import capacity became stagnant, the pressure created by the new demand for imported products pushed up the prices of products purchased abroad, thus permitting the import substitution process to continue. Since the import capacity remained depressed for a considerable period of time, the substitution process continued unabated. First, those non-durable products which could be manufactured were produced. This was followed by replacement of durable products, certain intermediary products and a fair amount of equipment. Nevertheless, this process reached a relative saturation point. Some products were hard to replace – wheat, coking coal, sulpher, for example; substitution of some required a great deal 83

CHAPTER 1

of effort and were time-consuming – crude oil, copper and heavy machinery. When this point of relative saturation was reached, substitution ceased to be a dynamic factor and became a serious handicap to accumulation. Thus, an obstacle to development was created that could only be overcome by the development of an autonomous technology and an independent supply of equipment characteristic of full economic development. Once the economy could base itself on the domestic industry for effecting investments, was it able to overcome the obstacles created by the import capacity or at least reduce the limitation to manageable proportions. Accumulation was supported by an inflationary process which assumed various forms over the decades from the 1930s. It redistributed income for the benefit of the groups linked to investment. The government policy of buying up the coffee stock benefited the small industrial sector indirectly and created conditions for a rapid growth. The transfer of income made possible by effective utilization of the productive capacity was a phenomenon of the first inflationary process of the 1930s. The substitution of imports enhanced its scope. The foreign exchange policy influenced the mechanism most profoundly. By stabilizing the exchange rate and introducing selective control of imports with a concomitant rise in the level of domestic prices, conditions were created for the great transfer of income that favoured industrial accumulation in the post-war period. Massive transfer of income occurred between 1949 and 1953 when internal prices went up by 15% and the foreign exchange rate remained stable. Weakening of the Dynamic Factor Industrialization was directly based on the system of replacing imports with domestically manufactured substitutions. Accumulation in the industrial sector was directly bound up with various waves of inflation. The inflation operated as a brake on structures and transferred recourses, to the most dynamic sector, by taxing consumers and causing an increase in investment. It was difficult to find investments for substitution of imports in the sixties. These were highly capitalised investments involving long maturation periods. The obstacles were quite formidable since 1955 due to a serious deterioration in the trade process. In order to overcome the difficulties, the nation was led to incur an increasing external debt. The medium term effect of this debt made itself felt on the economy. It caused further shrinking of the import capacity – this, in order to service large debts. A cumulative circular process was created in which measures to circumvent the barrier of the import capacity tended to strengthen the barrier. The factors supporting the industrialization process disappeared before capital formation had reached a self-growing stage vis-à-vis the external supply of capital goods. This fact seemed to indicate that the difficulties the country had been facing had deeper roots than initially suspected. Brazil was very close to the position where development could become a cumulative circular process creating its own expansionary momentum, argue some exports. The worsening of the terms of trade in 1955 put Brazil behind this decisive stage, the same sources maintain. 84


Important consequences resulted from the decrease in the rate of growth. The agricultural production for the home market was notoriously slow to respond to the demand generated by the industrial development. Unlike many other countries where agriculture commonly bore the whole weight of industrial accumulation in its early stages, in Brazil, the mass of consumers in general and the exporting agricultural sector, in particular, were the mainstay of industrial accumulation. The predominance of feudalism in agriculture caused great inelasticity in the supply of food for the urban areas which created serious obstacles to development. On the whole, prices of manufactured products went up less than those of agricultural products intended for home consumption. This phenomenon indicated the fact that the industrial capitalists as a class allocated a part of their profit to the interests tied up with the large estates. The process was further aggravated by an aggressive action by the working class and the spread of social conflict to the rural areas. There took place an ideological polarisation that obscured the internal contradiction of the propertied classes. This could have been avoided if there was industrialization of agriculture. Industrial support for agriculture was still in its early stages – the stage of supplying agricultural machinery at a high price in relation to price of imported goods of the same nature. With the industrial growth rate declining, there was a decline in agricultural labour, being engaged elsewhere. This reduced the overall demand for agricultural products. Consequently, investment in agriculture was discouraged and thus reduced even further the prospect of spontaneous changes in the structure. In view of the anachronistic and obsolete nature of the country’s sub-structure, which had been organised for the colonial economy, there was a pressing need for a massive effort for investment in the basic sectors: transportation, electric power, liquid fuel, steel works and so forth. These investments were required on a wide scale by public authority, if strangulation of the industrialization process was to be avoided. These could not be effectively done due to vacillations of the ruling class. The structural problems of a transitional economy became more apparent with the decline in the rate of growth. Those sections of the ruling class which had been demanding increased participation in the product, supported by a semi-feudal agrarian structure, exposed their anti-social character as soon as the rate of growth of the product decreased. A widening circle of opinion groups now became aware that development possibilities were being hampered by the activities of some groups. The people were being subjected to permanent rationing of essential agricultural products. Another structural problem was the Government’s incapacity to find adequate financial backing for the investments for which it was responsible and which were vital for the actual process of development. Condition in Northeast There were 25 million people in the North-east in the 1960s. Two-thirds of this population worked on land. These people had no political organisations of their own and, therefore, had no idea how to demand better living conditions. 85

CHAPTER 1

The bulk of the population lived over a narrow humid coastal strip, 30 to 40 miles in width. The great estates devoted to sugar introduced by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were situated here. The usina, a typical sugar cane establishment, comprised four to five agricultural units (engenhos) and sheltered around 10,000 people. At the centre of the usina was located the industrial unit, producing sugar and employing 5% to 8% of the estate workers. The rest of the population was the peasant mass who planted, tended, trimmed, harvested and transported the sugar cane. Agriculture was the principal activity of the usina. These people, till 1963, had no contractually defined labour relations. Their living in the feudally structured estates did not teach them to behave as normal citizens, conscious of their rights and duties. They lived and died in the estates. Their psychological horizon was unusually truncated. Cut off from all human, social and community relationships, working for the usina from morning till night, without any contact with the outside world - this was the pattern of living of these hapless people. This began to change from the 1950s and the process accentuated in the beginning of the 1960s. The great industrialization process generated an increase in income. Intensive urbanisation resulted in an appreciable increase in the consumption of sugar. National consumption rose from 30 million bags in 1953/54 to more than 46 million in 1962/63. An extremely favourable condition in the world market permitted export of sugar on a large scale. The output rose by 50 per cent. This resulted in extension of the acreage of suger cane cultivation to the progressive elimination of areas previously used for growing food crops. There was a tendency for a rise in real costs which created a heavy pressure on the workers’ wages. Thus a section of the peasants who cultivated food crops and vegetables (called morador) for their own consumption were transformed in a relatively short period of time into wage-earners from the previous status of share-croppers. This raised the cost of production. By carrying out its policy of expanding sugar production, the landlords cum owners of usinas unleashed powerful forces that called for structural changes in the sugar economy. Now, deprived of their small plot, these workers very soon organised themselves. The class consciousness was stimulated by the hard conditions imposed on the workers by the landowning class. Between 1960 and 1962, at the peak of this pressure, a peasant’s daily wage was hardly enough to buy even a small amount of cassava. There were widespread international concerns at the plight of these peasants in the Brazilian North-east. The peasant movement encountered organised and violent resistance from the sugar barons. Soon the peasants developed ways and means to secretly organise themselves. They transmitted their messages through symbols, communicated through ballads, created martyrs in a land where death in any case was the eventual outcome of such resistance. The Peasants’ league achieved some success in a few years which in normal circumstances would have taken decades. The organisation of the peasants till 1962 showed all the characteristics of a revolutionary structure. The league declared that it was fighting against an unjust social order. Where even organising a meeting was considered a crime, the peasants 86


retaliated. The Congress passed the Rural Workers’ Statute at the beginning of 1963. It had a profound effect on the Peasants’ League movement. By the force of their organisational strength, the sugar workers managed to achieve their objective in a surprisingly short period. After 1960, significant changes took place in the world sugar market due to the revolution in Cuba. As Cuba was eliminated from the U.S. market, the prospects for Brazilian sugar brightened. Thus, the north-eastern sugar industry began to export its total surplus, abandoning all concern for the country’s southern market. The social pressure for a rise in wages was now regarded with complacency since it was a powerful argument for raising the domestic price to the international level and eliminating the export tax recently introduced. A common bond was forged between the estate owners and the workers. Some political analysts have argued that the period of the great victories for the peasants of the sugar zone during 1962–1963 was also the period of compromise of the revolutionary potential of the peasant movement. With their wages on a par with those of the urban workers and supported by their superb organisation to implement the provisions of the Law, the peasants of the sugar zone were placed well above the typical share-cropper, artisan or even the small landholder. The Intermediate Zone The humid coastal lowland covered with typical forests is known as the Mata Zone. This zone extending from the state of Bahia to the state of Pernambuco constitute only a fraction of the North-east. In Paraiba and Rio Grande do Norte, this zone appears only at intervals in a few valleys and then reappears in Maranhao, outside the geographical boundaries of the North-east. The Caatanga zone, which means white forest, is the largest part of the Northeast. Covered with sparse vegetation, this zone experiences a long dry season. However, there are some areas in the zone, which are a bit elevated, and experience a greater rain precipitation. The zone lying between Mata and Caatanga is called Agreste. This zone is distinguished by a higher degree of moisture and better quality of the soil. The soil is good for cereal cultivation. The Caatanga zone was appropriated by the landowners from the colonial times. In the Caatanga economy cattle is considered to be the capital. The community that inhabited this zone was permitted to do so by the landowners. The Agreste region was inhabited by people who had migrated from the Mata zone during the decline of the sugar economy. The Palmares Republic of the runaway slaves was situated in this region. After the abolition of slavery, many former slaves also came to settle in this region. Those who inhabited this region were directly or indirectly connected with the sugar economy. Bush cotton, introduced in the Agreste zone, was cultivated by the inhabitants. Earnings from this supplemented their income. The estates in Agreste were generally smaller in size. Some of the estates were divided due to fractured inheritance giving rise to a regime of small holdings. 87

CHAPTER 1

The evolution of these estates was based on stock-raising because of a curious association with subsistence forms of agriculture. The surplus population that came to settle at Agreste were allowed to cultivate the soil within the boundary of the great estates on condition that the land would be abandoned whenever the owner needed it for grazing of the cattle. In some cases the landlord would demand one or two days of free labour per week. The small cultivator was only provided with the amount of land that could employ the family at the most primitive technical level. To increase income, the peasant was needed to use more uptodate methods of cultivation, which would require much more capital and land than available. Improvement in agricultural techniques could not be carried out without reducing the number of workers attached to the estate. Decrease in the number of workers and an increase in their income would have to result in a rise in the cost of manpower employed by the landowner in stock-rearing and other activities. Thus there was a conflict of interest between the mass of cultivators and the estate owner. Since the peasants here lived in communities, they were more conscious and organised. Here the Peasants’ League developed more rapidly. The struggle of the peasants here was directed towards defending possession of the land. The victories of the sugar cane workers had important repercussions. Once the wages of the rural workers were increased, it was apparent that the rent paid to the landowner during the period of subjection would either be reduced or eliminated. Sertao Region Sertao is a semi-arid region in the North-east. Rainfall is significantly less than the other two regions. It experiences rains in the summer. It is the root cause for the droughts. With the exception of the mountainous terrain, precipitation throughout Sertao is much lower than Agreste. The strip of Sertao extends from northern Bahia to Rio Grande do Norte, passing through the interior of Pernambuco and Paraiba where it receives the lowest precipitation. The characteristic semi-aridity is also the result of regional hydrological and geological characteristics. The underlying rocks hold very little moisture owing to lack of sedimentary beds which allow a high rate of evaporation. The most important constituent elements of the soil are washed away due to ‘leaching’. Vegetation in this region therefore is even more scanty. The natural vegetation of the region adapted itself to the natural conditions by a process of xerophytism. For eight months, in order to survive, the vital activities of the forest almost comes to a stop. It then becomes a phantom forest. During this lethargic period, the plants live on reserves of water stored in their roots. This enables them to recover as soon as the rains appear. Thus the process continues. Occupation in Sertao is more or less similar to that of Agreste. For a long time, the only kind of organised economy in Sertao and Caatinga was extensive stockraising. In the 19th century, the growth of cotton acquired significance in the Sertao region. An arborescent variety began to be cultivated. Cross-breeding with other varieties enabled cotton production to increase. During the U.S civil war, this cultivation became quite important. 88


By creating the condition for absorption of an increasing amount of manpower, cotton cultivation provided an outlet for the people. The labour force planting cotton also planted food crops. After harvesting, the stubble was used as cattle feed. Thus drought became more of a social problem. The appropriation of cotton was done through ruthless exploitation of the workers by the landowners. With the drought problem assuming the proportion of a national calamity, the Federal Government built many reservoirs in the cultivation areas to store water during the rainy season for utilization later. However, taking advantage of these measures, the landowners started using the land for cultivation of cash crops such as sugar. This put the population at high risk since sugar cultivation eliminated subsistence farming. The sugar boom in the sixties proved to be a curse for the Sertao peasants. Events Leading to Military Coup The economic system and social structure of Brazil in 1930 had changed little from the century before. The economy was based on exportable commodities, especially coffee. These were produced in the great estates and financed by the state, chiefly on the basis of taxes imposed on foreign trade. About 80% people either lived on large estates or were directly or indirectly subject to the authority of the great landowners. Only 1% of the population participated in the political process. The landowners held control of the municipal and state governments. Stagnation in the export economy, concentration of investments in the manufacturing sector, and growth of State activities brought about important changes in the country’s social structure. As the urban population grew from 7% in 1920 to around 30% in 1960, with a much higher literacy co-efficient than the rural, the political activity showed an important shift of its centre of gravity. These changes in social structure did not find an adequate reflection in the political institutions. The lack of an industrial class hindered the emergence of a new leadership capable to bring forth necessary changes for the modernization of the political institutions. There were many reasons why such a situation developed. One of the reasons was that Sao Paulo came to represent an increasing proportion of the total Brazilian industrial output, contributing around 40 percent during the 1960s. This geographical concentration of industrial activity in a country with a federal power structure tended to reduce the political importance of the industrial sector. The lack of political influence of the industrial class and the slow process of modernization of the political institutional framework left the traditional oligarchical power almost intact. The federal system which provided considerable power to the Senate in which the small agricultural sectors of the most backward areas had a decisive influence, placed the legislative power under the control of the minority of the population living in areas where the interests of the great estates held undisputed sway. On the other hand, as representation of the individual States in the Chamber was proportional to the population, illiterates were represented by fellow literate citizens. Thus the vote of a citizen living in a State where 80% of the population 89

CHAPTER 1

was illiterate was worth five times as much as the vote of a citizen living in a State with 100% literacy. As traditional oligarchy was most powerful in the most illiterate States, the electoral system contributed towards maintenance of the oligarchy in power, finding in illiteracy one of its props. This was the reason why various groups – industry-owners, religious leaders as well as progressive parties – tried to inculcate literacy with an eye to the future vote bank. This fact is also not without a bearing on the strong reaction shown by many local authorities in the more backward regions against the introduction of techniques for simplifying the spread of literacy. As we know, necessity is the mother of invention. Freire’s methods for quick access to literacy as well as his theories of liberation came from the concrete Brazilian reality which needed political representation of the popular classes in the democratic institutions. Experience in Brazil has revealed that with the creation of new political parties that would champion the cause of the emerging working class and middle class, it was possible to develop movements in the urban centres that would affect the results of major elections. In fact, election of the President of the Republic and State Governors in the more urbanized states had been increasingly influenced by forces that would evade control by the oligarchy. Conditions had arisen in which the Executive Power represented emergent political forces that defined control of the establishments which concentrate its forces in the Congress. Tension between these two powers continued increasing after the World War II. The Brazilian industrialization was not accompanied by disorganization of craft industries as in Europe and therefore the workers did not suffer from the complex of social degradation. On the contrary, having emerged from conditions similar to those of a rural serf, the worker was aware of having risen on the social scale. Increased public expenditure with a heavy concentration of income creating an expanding market for services, was another factor responsible for the creation of urban employment. This urbanization process was also linked to conditions in the rural areas. There was a decrease in the average area of the small holdings. This phenomenon coupled with the soil exhaustion and increased distances from the consumption centres caused a decrease in the standard of living for a greater part of the rural population. This population tended to move to other agricultural regions to try to find some form of occupation. From this inter-rural migratory process, a growing proportion of the population tended to filter in the urban areas, where even the most precarious livelihood seemed quite attractive. Thus in all Brazilian cities, big and small, great masses of underemployed population began to concentrate, occasionally being employed in public works, building construction and unstable jobs in services. This heterogeneous urban population in which a privileged middle class existed side by side with a growing mass of the proletariat had become the decisive factor in Brazilian political struggles. The social tensions expressed states of dissatisfaction among a growing urban mass. This amorphous mass constituted the backbone of the populist movements that characterized Brazilian political struggles in the late 1950s and the early 1960s of the last century. 90


The emergence of a mass society paving the way for populism, without the formation of new ruling groups able to work out a plan for national development as an alternative paradigm was the chief characteristic of the historical process. The populist leaders, dictated by the psychology of the masses called for rapid modernization through ‘basic reforms’ and ‘structural changes’. Control of the lever of power was in the hands of the oligarchy. The tension and contradiction between the two forces were primarily responsible for the growing political instability which resulted in the military coup in 1964. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Gilberto Freyre, The Masters nd the Slaves, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970, p. 11. Ibid, p. 11. Ibid, p. 1. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 72. Alfred W.Crosby, The columbian exchange, Green wood Press, Connecticut, pp. 122–163. n. 1, p. 76. Ibid, p. 77. Ibid, p. 78. Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, Continuum, New York, 1998. n. 1, p. 113. Ibid, p. 113. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 171. Ibid, p. 172. Ibid, p. 175. Ibid, p. 177. Ibid, p. 299. Ibid, p. 319. Ibid, p. 343. Ibid, pp. 343–347. Ibid, p. 351. Ibid, p. 394. Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968, pp. 8–9. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, p. 57. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, p. 77. Ibid, p. 79. Ibid, p. 79. Ibid, pp. 87–88. Ibid, p. 97. Ibid, p. 147. Ibid, p. 170. Ibid, p. 231. Ibid, p. 232. Ibid, p. 234. Ibid, p. 235.

91

CHAPTER 1 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92

Ibid, p. 261. Ibid, p. 262. Ibid, p. 461. Gilberto Freyre, Order and Progress, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1970, p. 53. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 56 Ibid, pp. 68–69. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, pp. 104–107. Ibid, pp. 108–110. Ibid, pp. 110–111. Ibid, pp. 111–113. Ibid, pp. 113–114. Ibid, pp. 116–117. Ibid, p. 127. Ibid, p. 156. Ibid, p. 159. Ibid, pp. 169–170. Ibid, p. 179. Ibid, p. 189. Ibid, pp. 203–204. Ibid, p. 204. Ibid, p. 204. Ibid, p. 204. Ibid, pp. 204–205. Ibid, p. 205. Ibid, pp. 205–206. Ibid, p. 206. Ibid, pp. 206–207. Ibid, p. 207. Ibid, pp. 207–208. Ibid, pp. 208–209. Ibid, p. 209. Ibid, pp. 209–210. Ibid, p. 218. Ibid, p. 220. Ibid, p. 222. Ibid, p. 222. Ibid, p. 222. Ibid, p. 233. Ibid, p. 269. Ibid, p. 269. Ibid, p. 294. Ibid, p. 310. Ibid, p. 313. Ibid, p. 315. Ibid, pp. 326–328. Ibid, pp. 342–343. Ibid, p. 347. Ibid, p. 350. Ibid, p. 367.

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONDITION OF BRAZIL 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

Ibid, p. 356. Ibid, p. 366. Ibid, p. 366. Celso Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil, University of California Pres, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963, p. 127. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, p. 143. Ibid, p. 149. Ibid, pp. 154–155. Ibid, p. 171. Ibid, p. 195. Ibid, p. 211. E. Bradford Bwons, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History, Prentice Hall International, London, 1982, p. 12. Marcel Niedergang, The Twenty Latin Americas I, Penguin Books, Middlesex, UK, 1971, pp. 76–77. Ibid, p. 105. Calso Furtodo, Diagnosis of the Brazilian Crisis, University of California Press, 1965, p. 89.

93

CHAPTER 2

PAULO FREIRE Relevant Biography

SECTION – I I

In his autobiographical work ‘Letters to Cristina’, Paulo Freire gives the reader an indication of the difficulties he faced in his childhood and adolescent years. He explains that he remembers those days not out of nostalgia but to derive appropriate lessons. He says, “I do not return to my early years as someone who is sentimentally moved by a ridiculous nostalgia or as someone who presents his not-so-easy childhood and adolescence as a form of revolutionary credentials”.1 “In my own case” he further explains, “the difficulties I confronted during my childhood and adolescent years caused in me – rather than an accommodating position before challenges – a curious and hopeful openness toward the world. I never felt inclined to accept reality as it was, even when it was still impossible for me to understand the roots of my family’s difficulties. I never thought that life was predetermined or that the best thing to do was to accept obstacles as they appeared. On the contrary, even in my very early years I had begun to think that the world needed to be changed; that something wrong with the world could not and should not continue. Perhaps I wanted the world to change because of the negative context in which my family lived. Finding myself immersed in predicaments that did not affect the children around me, I learned to compare my situation with theirs. This led me to conclude that the world needed to be corrected. The active outlook later resulted in two significant beliefs: 1. Because I had experienced poverty, I never allowed myself to fall into fatalism; 2. Because I had been born into a Christian family, I never accepted our precarious situation as an expression of God’s wishes. On the contrary, I began to understand that something really wrong with the world needed to be fixed”.2 Many in the West suspected in Paulo Freire’s radicality a troubled childhood, especially at home; that he was not loved by parents or that the parents had difficult or strained relationship. Refuting such conjectures and arguing that his radicality could only be explained by the rude facts of the then Brazilian social condition, its undemocratic nature, racial and class divisions etc., Paulo says, “My lived experiences as a child and as a man took place socially within the history of a dependent society in whose terrible dramatic nature I participated early on… it was this terrible nature of society that fostered, my increasing radicality. It would be a mistake for people to see my radicality, which never became extreme, as the traumatic expression of a child who was not loved and felt desperately alone”.3 95

CHAPTER 2

Paulo further explains, “… I was never alone or unloved. I never doubted my parents’ affection for me or their love for each other and my brothers and sisters. The security of the love in our family helped us to confront the real problem that afflicted us during the greater part of my childhood: the problem of hunger. It was a real and concrete hunger that had no specific date of departure. Even though it never reached the rigor of the hunger experienced by some people I know, it was not the hunger experienced by those who undergo a tonsil operation or are dieting. On the contrary, our hunger was of the type that arrives unannounced and unauthorised, making itself at home without an end in sight. A hunger that, if it was not softened as ours was, would take over our bodies, molding them into angular shapes. Legs, arms and fingers become skinny. Eye sockets become deeper, making the eyes almost disappear. Many of our classmates experienced this hunger and today it continues to afflict millions of Brazilians who die of its violence every year”.4 Many times with no means to resist, Freire would feel defeated by hunger while doing homework. Sometimes he would fall asleep leaning on the table where he was studying as if he had been drugged. He tried to fight this hunger induced sleep by opening his eyes really wide and fixing them, with some difficulty, on the science and history texts that were part of his elementary school work. “It was, as if, the words became pieces of food”5, says Freire. Sukanta Bhattacharya, a Bengali poet of the 1940s, wrote that the full moon looked like a puffed up round bread, having perhaps undergone the same experience.6 On these occasions, after tremendous efforts, he could read the words one by one without, however, understanding the meaning of the text composed of those words. It may be pointed out that reading the texts in those childhood days meant memorizing them mechanically. The capacity to memorize texts was seen as a sign of intelligence. The more Freire failed to memorize the texts, the more convinced he became of his insurmountable ignorance. This perhaps led many of his teachers to believe that Paulo was a mentally retarded child. Though it was necessary for Paulo to live through many such experiences, it was more important for him to eat more frequently. Sometime later he realized that his ignorance was not as marked as he had thought. “My perceived ignorance”, says Freire, “was, at the very least, less than my hunger”7. While working as the Director for the Department of Education of a private school in Recife, Paulo came across many students as he was in his early life. As a child he was advised to incessantly repeat his lessons so that he could memorize. How could he have learned geography, however, if the only possible geography was the geography of his hunger, he wondered. ‘We knew all the places between the dead leaves to carefully hide the not-so-ripe bananas so they could ripen protected from other hungers, such as those of the ‘rightful property’ owners. One of the fruit orchard owners caught me one early morning while I was trying to steal a beautiful papaya from his backyard. He unexpectedly appeared in front of me, giving me no opportunity to flee. I must have turned pale by surprise and shock. I did not know what to do with my shaking hands, from which the papaya fell to the ground. I did not know what to do with my body – if I should be stiff or relaxed before this serious, rigid person who embodied censure.’8 96

PAULO FREIRE

Freire recounts other experiences of a similar nature. “For us”, says Freire, “our geography was, without a doubt, not only a concrete geography, if I may say so, but a geography, that had special meaning. In our geography, we interpreted the two worlds in which we lived intensely: the world of children (in which we played soccer, swam and flew kites) and the world of premature men (in which we were concerned with our hunger and the hunger of our family)”9. “We had friends in both of these worlds”, explains Freire. “Among them some never knew the meaning of spending the whole day on a piece of bread, a cup of coffee, and a little rice and beans; or of looking for available fruit in somebody else’s yard. Even when some of them participated with us in stealing from people’s yards, they would do so for different reasons, for solidarity or for the thrill of adventure. In our case, there was something more pressing-our need to kill our hunger.”10. A middle-class background was also a great impediment to survival. “By my eleventh birthday, I had full knowledge of my family’s precarious financial condition, but no means to help through a gainful job. Like my father, I could not just do away with my necktie, which was more than an expression of masculine style. It represented my class position, which did not allow me, for example, to have a job in the weekly market carrying packages or to do odd jobs in someone else’s household”.11 II

Paulo Freire was born on September 19, 1921, in a middle-class family of Recife, capital of the State of Pernambuco, in the northeastern part of Brazil. He was the youngest of four children. His family suffered like thousand of others the world economic crisis of 1929, the period of the great depression. As a “connective kid”, he participated in a world of those who ate well and in the world of others who hailed from very poor families. Though united by the feeling of hunger, these two groups were separated socially and culturally. “I remember that”, says Paulo Freire, “in spite of the hunger that gave us solidarity with the children from the poor outskirts of the town, in spite of the bond that united us in our search for ways to survive – our playtime, as far as the poor children were concerned, marked us as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world”.12 This division was more pronounced in the cultural background of the families. “In our house, we had a German piano on which Lourdes, one of our aunts, played Chopin, Beethoven and Mozart. The piano alone was enough to distinguish our class from that of Douardo, Reginaldo, Baixa, Toinho Morango, and Gerson Macaco, who were our friends in those days. The piano in our house was like the tie around my father’s neck. In spite of all our difficulties, we did not get rid of the piano, nor did my father do away with his necktie. Both the piano and the necktie were, in the end, symbols that helped us remain in the class to which we belonged. They implied a certain lifestyle, a certain way of being, a certain way of speaking, a certain way of walking, a special way of greeting people that involved bowing slightly and tipping 97

CHAPTER 2

your hat, as I had often seen my father do. All of these things were an expression of class. All of these things were defended by our family as an indispensable condition of survival”13. The social and cultural context that we have portrayed in detail in the first chapter, including the role of a piano in such families, will attest to the authenticity of Paulo Freire’s explanation. “The piano was not a mere instrument for Lourdes’s artistic enjoyment, nor were my father’s neckties just a clothing style. They both marked our class position. To lose those class markers would have meant losing our solidarity with members of the middle class in a step-by-step march toward the poor people on the outskirts of town. From there, it would have been very difficult to return to our middle-class milieu. It, therefore, became necessary to preserve these class markers in order psychologically to enable our family to deal with our financial crisis and maintain our class position. …. With these markers, we were able to borrow money. Even though it was not easy, without them, it would have been almost impossible. With those markers, our childhood food thefts, if discovered, would have been treated as mere pranks. ….”14 Paulo describes an incident which is quite shocking, to say the least. He writes, “It was a Sunday morning. Perhaps it was ten or eleven ‘o’ clock. It doesn’t matter. We had just teased our stomachs with a cup of coffee and a thin slice of bread without butter. This would have been enough food to keep us going, even if we had eaten plenty the day before, which we hadn’t. I don’t remember what we were doing, if we were conversing or playing. 1 just remember that my two older brothers and 1 were sitting on the ledge of the cement patio at the edge of the yard where we lived. The yard contained some flower beds - roses, violets, and daisies - and some lettuce, tomato and kale plants that my mother had pragmatically planted. The lettuce, tomatoes and kale improved our diet. .. It was then that our attention was attracted by the presence of a chicken that probably belonged to our next door neighbours. …. In a split second, as if we had rehearsed it, premeditated it, we had the kicking chicken in our hands. “My mother arrived shortly after. She did not ask any questions. The four of us looked at each other and at the dead chicken. ….. “Today, many years after that morning, I can appreciate the conflict that my mother, who was a Christian Catholic, must have felt as she looked at us in perplexity and silence. Her alternatives were either to reproach us severely and make us return the still warm chicken to our neighbours or to prepare the fowl as a special dinner… silent, she took the chicken, walked across the patio, entered the kitchen, and lost herself in doing a job she had not done in a long time.”15 III

Until March of 1932, when the family moved to a nearby town called Jaboatao, Paulo Freire’s family lived in Recife. They lived in a medium-sized house surrounded by trees. Paulo, who was born in this house, had developed a special relationship with the trees there. The old house with its hallway, rooms, narrow patio and 98

PAULO FREIRE

backyard were Paulo’s first experiences of this world. He says, “In this world I learned to walk and talk. In it I also heard my first scary stories about ghosts. ….”16 There was a grandfather-clock in the house. One very difficult month, Paulo saw the clock being sold away. “I don’t know the history of the big clock. All I know is that when I was born the big clock was already there... it came into our family toward the end of the last century...”17 “I think that”, says Paulo, “at home, no matter how much I tried to hide my fear, people suspected its existence. Especially, my father. Every once in a while I would hear his steps walking toward my bed. Guided by the oil lamp light, he would check to see if I was asleep…. his care for me made me happy”.18 On several occasions, Paulo referred to the love and care of his parents. The family tried to fight the adversities unitedly. Paulo Freire’s father played an important role in his upbringing. Being appreciative, intelligent and open, he never refused to listen to the children or talk to them about their interests. Paulo says that his parents were “a harmonious couple whose union did not lose them their individuality…. my mother was Catholic and my father was a spiritualist, they always respected each other’s religious opinions. From them, I learned early on the value of dialogue.”19 “They taught me”, continues Paulo, “how to read my first words and then how to write them on the ground with a wooden stick under the shade of our mango tree. My first words and phrases were linked to my experiences and not to my parents”.20 Instead of a boring primer or worse, an ‘ABC Table’ for memorizing the letters of the alphabet, Paulo had his backyard as the first primer, his first world, his first school. The ground, protected by tree leaves, was his blackboard and twigs were his chalk. He began to attend the school of Eunice Vasconcelos at the age of six. But he knew his alphabets already. “I have never forgotten the joy with which I welcomed the exercises called ‘sentence forming’ that our teacher gave us”, recalls Paulo Freire. “She would ask me to write in a straight line all the words that I knew. Afterwards, I was supposed to form sentences with these words and later we discussed the meaning of each sentence I had created. This is how, little by little, I began to know my verbs, tenses and moods; she taught me by increasing the level of difficulty. My teacher’s fundamental preoccupation was not with making me memorize grammatical definitions but with stimulating the development of my oral and writing abilities”.21 “There was no rupture between my parents’ teaching at home and the pedagogy of my teacher Eunice at school”,22 adds Freire. “Only two other teachers besides Eunice”, says Paulo, “from whom I learned how to form sentences, marked me: Aurea Bahia in Recife and Cecilia Brandao in Jaboatao”.23 Other primary schools that Paulo attended in his childhood were boring and mediocre. Freire, in a very Sartrian way, describes the moralistic atmosphere of the Brazilian middle-class homes: “Adelino’s words, which had filled the entire room, now emptied it. A heavy silence took over, hanging over everyone, covering the table, contouring the walls and underlining the sound of the thunder”.24 He writes this in connection with an incident in which one of the elders used some slangs in 99

CHAPTER 2

an evening conversation where women and children were present. We find an echo of Sartre in ‘Being and Nothingness’.25 But Paulo’s family was quite open and less conservative. “I believe that the openness in my family was decisively due to my father’s influence.”26 Paulo’s family left for Jaboatao in 1932. Paulo had to leave the big house and all those familiar surroundings – the trees, neighbours, friends. It was a traumatic experience for him. Paulo recollects, “we left Recife due to the difficulties our family had begun to experience two or three years earlier; one of my maternal uncles Rodavalho, was forced to propose the move. The difficulties would have been felt earlier if it had not been for my uncle’s help when my father became inactive due to his health.”27. This move to Jaboatao uprooted Freire from his preferred world, separating him from his beloved trees, the singing canary birds, and his world of friends. It also yanked him away from a new experience in school life that he had just started. It cut short his three months with Aurea Bahia, the new teacher. Paulo felt like being expelled; he felt as if he was dying a slow death. Paulo Freire reminisces the gentle art of the packers and movers when the family was shifting. He writes, “I watched all the furniture, piece by piece, leave the house-Lourdes’ German piano, the straw chairs, the old drawing table from the last century, the pestle for grinding roasted coffee beans, and the copper pans for the corn soup on the feast of Saint Johns. The hands of the sweet corn were always brought the day before. We all took part in preparing the corn husks, getting the ears ready to be shaved. The shaved sweet corn was added to a portion of the coconut milk and put over the oven in copper pans that had been rigorously cleaned. Once on the fire, the patient work of mixing the corn would begin. Although the entire process of making the corn soup was pleasing to me, 1 was most curious when little by little, the liquid mass began to thicken and then, all of a sudden, changed from liquid to near solid. This signalled that the corn was ready. “Another moment was impossible for me to forget”, continues Paulo. “With spoon in hand, we used to argue over what remained in the pan after the corn soup had been transferred to the old serving bowls of my grand-mother. At night, we added cinnamon powder to some of the bowls, making designs on the corn soup. We gave these to our closest neighbours who had brought plates of food to us on other occasions. Under the rubric of courtesy, each family participated in a kind of culinary competition, a competition that was not expressed out loud, to make the best corn soup on the street”.28 How oriental these traditions were! And what a perfect household it was from which little Paulo was uprooted! IV

Joaquim Temistocles, Paulo Freire’s father, was born in Rio Grande do Norte, in the northern part of Brazil. He “migrated to Recife while still young, at the beginning of the twentieth century, bringing with him only a certificate of his studies in the humanities and a taste of adventure”.29 One of the reasons for his leaving the parental home was a “distaste for forced co-existence with an authoritarian stepfather”.30 100

PAULO FREIRE

He joined the army, a career quite popular to young people in those days. The army was an alternative route for social recognition. He left the army after attaining the rank of a Sergeant. “He transferred to the Pernambuco Military Police with that rank, at a time when a new state government was invested in reforming the police”31 Paulo Freire, as we know, was born in 1921, three years before Joaquim retired as a Captain in 1924 due to ill-health. He died of arterial sclerosis in 1934. Joaquim Freire was not at all satisfied with the police force. “. He was not involved in certain developments among the officers of the Pernambuco Military Police back in the 1920s”, says Freire. He continues, “I am referring to the military personnel who disguised as ‘poor bums’ while being, in fact, murderers - joined the so-called ‘handkerchief gang’, a group known for its violent attacks on and persecution of journalists who opposed the government”.32 The ‘duty’ of a police officer did not inspire him. Therefore, on the eve of such attacks, he would be sent on some mission outside Recife. Paulo Freire portrayed his father as a kind person. “One day 1 surprised my father sitting in his bedroom next to my mother and crying due to his powerlessness before the obstacles he faced providing his family with minimum of comfort.”33 “His forced retirement”, comments Paulo, “brought him closer to all of us. He would take every opportunity he had to engage one of his sons or his daughter in conversation. Never did he indulge in erudite learning, nor did he force conversation on a topic which did not interest us. He questioned and challenged us while introducing us to different topics.”34 The military academies in Brazil were dedicated more to intellectual pursuits than to military manouvres. Therefore, as Paulo Freire’s description suggests, Temistocles was quite an intellectual who detested the ‘dirty’ job of a policeman. We find corroboration in Paulo’s statement: “He was available to us at all times including those hours he dedicated to his studies or to his carpentry work in an improvised and somewhat precarious workshop”.35 With the renewed migrations of the nineteenth century, European migrants to Brazil took up jobs of skilled labourers in the trades like carpentry, plumbing, etc. These jobs were not taken up by earlier generations of white Brazilians. But the new migrants from Europe, especially after the industrial revolution, were quite comfortable with these trades. Temistocles, it seems, learnt the job of a carpenter in the army. He again took up this trade after retirement. However, he was not successful even in this profession. He could produce a good piece of woodwork but lacked the skill of selling the product with profit. He also worked as a merchandise supplier of local grocery shops. Here, too, he could not succeed. “With considerable sacrifice, he gathered the money to make the meagre investment. The result was even greater failure”36 Out of these trials and tribulations, Paulo gained valuable insights. He writes, “Through my troubled childhood, and my experience of my parents’ moral pain – a pain almost always treated with disrespectful language I, learned to respect those who find themselves in a position of weakness or frailty. In particular, I learned that from my mother. It hurts me to say of another, even if, just to myself, that he or she is a liar or an opportunist’.37 Freire continues, “for example, when my mother would kindly and timidly apologize to the butcher for not having paid for 101

CHAPTER 2

an insignificant quantity of meat from last week and would ask for more credit to buy an additional half pound, she would also promise to pay both debts. In reality she was not lying or trying to take advantage of the situation. She needed to promise, on the one hand, for a very concrete reason (her family’s hunger), and, on the other, for an ethical reason (the ethics of a middle class, Catholic woman). And when the hostile, sexist butcher spoke disrespectfully back with his aggressive words, he would hurt, destroy, quiet her. I can see her now, at this very moment, crushed, frail, teary-eyed. She would leave the shop to look for another one, where new offences were almost always added to those already suffered”.38 “I do not imply today”, concludes Paulo, “nor did I believe then, that the butcher should have financed our crisis out of his own pocket. What angered me was the disrespect of those in positions of power toward those who had none”39 What Paulo Freire described in the above passage is the experience of hundreds of thousands of families of the developing world where, due to various personal or national catastrophe, decent middle-class men and women, mothers and sisters, fathers, uncles and brothers suffer similar humiliations. Some, somehow maintain themselves in the class, but a substantial number slide down the ladder and join the underfed, undernourished and unlettered working class. Paulo Freire writes, “At that time, had my family lost its strength and descended to the deepest level of need, we might have experienced what my aunt Natercia, a sweet-creature, called ‘open poverty’. But, while being chased away at butcher shops for not paying our debts, we somehow managed to recover. Of necessity, however, we remained in what aunt Natercia called ‘hidden poverty’… It is easier now to understand why the family would not let go Lourdes’ German piano or my father’s neckties”40 Paulo Freire lovingly remembers what he learnt from his father. “My father was the first we heard to criticise the divide between manual and intellectual work. In informal conversations….. I also learned my first lessons on Brazilian politics from him. Formerly of the military and without any systematic participation of a partisan nature, my father, nonetheless, deeply identified with the opposition to the Washington Luiz government, which led to Getulio Vargas’s presidency in 1930.”41 V

Joboatao was a small municipal town. Its industry consisted of a few sugarcane farms which supplied cane to two or three medium sized sugar mills. A paper-making factory of German ownership and some small gravel factories were also there. There were also the repair-bays of the then Great Western Railway Company. A small retail industry, two or three company stores were also the sources of employment. If this was the industrial scenario, education fared no better. There were some elementary schools sprinkled around the rural area. A few mediocre state schools existed in the town. Paulo Freire talks of two outstanding educationists of Jaboatao: Cecilia Brandao and Odete Antunes. “An extraorginary woman”, writes Freire, “Cecilia was a blend of tradition and modernity. She combined, at sixty years of age, full-length dresses, 102

PAULO FREIRE

long sleeves, and high necklines with a curiosity about the sciences and the world. She graduated from the University of Recife’s Law School at the age of sixty. .. Cecilia awoke in me the almost limitless longing for language ...”42 Since Freirean innovation in the field of literacy had a lot to do with language itself, it is worth noting Paulo’s comments on various influences. He writes, “... It is interesting to note, for example, that the first significant influence I received in this area … was from Eunice Vasconcelos. Eunice was my first professional teacher ... who taught me how to ‘make sentences’ ... She paved the way for Cecilia, Jose Pessoa and Moacir Albuquerque. ....It was Jose Pessoa who... suggested that I teach Portuguese... “Moacir Albuquerque…. instilled an awareness of how joyful and important it is to seek the aesthetic moment, the beauty of language.” “He would refer to those like Gilberto Freyre, Machado de Assis and Eça de Queiroz as scholars who corrupted the Portuguese language, ‘de-boned’ it.”43 Paulo Freire talks of the rivers of Jaboatao which completely changed his perception. “.... Duas Unas - came from afar, snaking through the city and was full of beautiful spots including small quasi-bays we called ‘bowls’ surrounded by Inga trees that made the water golden with a pollen where boys bathed, swam, fished and stared, their hearts pounding, at women bathing naked... “There was life in them, fish, shrimp, lobster, and fresh-water weeds. And in the river we experienced intense life.” “It was because of our proximity to Duas Unas that my brothers and I changed, though not suddenly of course. Moving from a tree-shaded urban backyard to a new sociological context – that of river-bank dwellers – changed our whole psychology.” “We changed because the new contours challenged our bodies and our sexuality with new stimuli. Previously, in Recife, we lived among large shady trees and very close to grown-ups. In Jaboatao, by the river, we had the opportunity to see naked women’s bodies.” “....Our financial crisis... taught us very quickly to make our own toys and fishing rods with safety-pin hooks. The water road... offered banks filled with birds ...and water filled with different kinds of fish”.44 Paulo Freire also recalls his outdoor games, especially soccer. “We played incredibly lively soccer matches there and then would swim in the popular swimming style, with no set style or rules”45 At this stage of his life, Paulo Freire came to know of a teacher nicknamed Mr.Armada, a representative of the oppressive school system. Freire recalled a tragi-comic incident involving this autocrat and his students. “Mr. Armada was a tall man”, writes Freire, “a man of the people, of little education ...” “None of the children who lived in the area had any peace just thinking that they might end up enrolled at his famous school. It was a private school in the small living room of his house, with more children than space.” “Move it Pedrinho, hurry up, boy. If you continue like this I’ll end up throwing you in Mr. Armada’s school”. This must have been how mothers and fathers encouraged their Pedrinhos and Carminhas to behave. 103

CHAPTER 2

“Just from hearing the stories about the teacher, I strongly reacted against him. On hearing the stories our friend had told us at the river, I dreamt of seeing Mr. Armada prohibited from owning a school and being made to kneel down on corn kernels, so mean was he to the kids. “As we got closer to Armada’s ‘village’, we knew we were in the right neighbourhood. We could hear an oral drill, sounding like the tones of a rosary prayer. “A B plus A makes BA, a B plus E makes BE, a B plus I makes BI, a B plus O makes BO, a B plus U makes BU. “BA, BE, BI, BO, BU, BA, BE, BI, BO, BU BA BA, BE BE, BI BI, BO BO, BU BU “We stopped about ninety feet from the little school, in the shade of a tree, not knowing exactly what to do. There was a silence and then another drill began. “1 plus 1, 2; 1 plus 2, 3; 1 plus 3, 4; 1 plus 4, 5; 1 plus 5, 6; 1 plus 6, 7; 1 plus 7, 8; 1 plus 8, 9; 1 plus 9, 10; We heard Mr. Armada’s strong, booming voice, ‘4 plus 2, 6; 4 plus 2, 6;’ All of a sudden we heard an unusual noise and saw this skinny boy, quick as an arrow, almost fly out of his house. Behind him, with an irate face, enraged eyes, and waving arms, Mr.Armada and his kilos came running at a disadvantage. The boy shot by us like a bullet, at least thirty or forty feet ahead of Mr. Armada. All of a sudden, as if he had run over his own anger, Mr. Armada tripped and fell straight down to the ground. His blue jeans ripped at the knee and he bled from the fall of his full weight against the hard, dry ground. Mr. Armada yelled at the boy, saying that the boy would not escape his anger, his punishment, his violence. Half-sitting, he turned to the little school, which had by then emptied of children. Scared, they stood on the street, looking at his fallen body and anger. Mr. Armada, for his part, yelled and screamed threatening everything and everybody. “Mr. Armada had fallen only four feet away from us. We could see the full extent of his anger. Anger at the boy who had provoked him, anger at the humiliation of his heavy body tumbling to the ground, anger at the pain of his bleeding knee and anger at the boy’s temporary victory. “I could see all those angers on his face, the rage in his eyes. “The neighbours came quickly and helped Mr. Armada up, while the kids, overtaken by a great fear, returned silently to the school. “Perhaps Mr. Armada’s fall, his big body striking the ground, his failed effort to sit up, his defeat by the accident, helped the kids understand that Mr. Armada was also vulnerable. He had tripped, tumbled and fallen. “That might explain the rebelliousness with which the children of the area were seized by after the episode. Our friend told us, another time by the river, that Mr. Armada was now harassed every time he walked the streets of his neighbourhood. Some kid was always hiding around a corner, behind a tree to yell, ‘Did Mr. Armada fall? Yes, he did. Did Mr. Armada cry? Yes, he did”46 There is no doubt that Mr. Armada haunted Paulo Freire for a long time. The repressive Brazilian social system was the fertile ground for nurturing the kinds of Mr. Armada. But Paulo Freire visualised a system in which the Armadas would fall giving rise to a situation where the students would neither be dominated by the master nor 104

PAULO FREIRE

dominate the masters. A dialogical master-pupil relationship would question the prevailing social system. Paulo Freire concludes, “The more the soft voice of the oppressed makes fun of the oppressor (while the body of the oppressed is hidden, unreachable), the more the voice becomes capable of robbing the oppressor of peace. At some point the oppressor becomes feeble”47 VI

Jaboatao in 1932 had no high school. Students had to commute daily to Recife in a slow train. There was just one movie house where Paulo and his friends, when luck favoured them, could snatch the last few minutes with the help of a kind porter. There were two musical bands – one called Railway Band, made up of office workers from the Great Western Railways, and the other called Banda Paroquial, organised and directed by an extraordinary artist and priest, Father Cromacio Leao. The two bands were always engaged in the hottest disputes. The advent of the patron saint of the town, Saint Amaro, used to be celebrated in the month of January. It was a time to show off new clothes, new shoes. Shades of red characterised the clothes of the dark haired peasants who used to come to pay homage to their saint and ask for a better year. Paulo remembers with nostalgia the outdoor concerts of Jaboatao, Christmas and New Year feasts, the feasts of Saint Amaro; the 7 A.M train, the trip to Osvaldo Cruz High School, stopping at Pedro Augusta and Our Lady of Carmo, where ‘I left behind a piece of my happiness’.48 “The 7:00 AM train, the students feeling happy or worried about their exams – Dulce, Teo, Salma, lracy, Carneiro Leao, and Toscano. Among them was me, although perhaps they did not notice; I was poor, skinny, awkward and ugly. I often felt inhibited. If I had a toothache, I would do everything to hide it. Letting on that I had a toothache would have provoked the suggestion that I go to the dentist, but we could not afford it. Then, because I did not go to the dentist, the condition would worsen. The pain would become more acute as the cavity reached some depth. My insecurity would increase and take on new forms with the continued deterioration of my teeth. I would, for example, change the way I smiled”49 In his struggle against such insecurities, Paulo would find protection in his study of Portuguese. He would help his classmates overcome their difficulties regarding Portuguese grammar. Thus he would recover the strength he was lacking. “My knowledge of the syntactical rules governing the use of the pronoun se offset my image of myself as bony and ugly”.50 Paulo has given a moving account of how he was admitted to high school. He writes, “... After a week of visiting the high schools of Recife looking for one that would accept me for free, my mother had met Dr. Aluizio Araujo, who gave her the much sought after ‘yes’. She had left Jaboatao early that morning with the hope that, when she returned in the afternoon, she would bring with her the happiness of having gotten me a scholarship for my high school studies. I still remember her face smiling softly as she told me the news while we walked from the train station to our house. I’d known what time she would arrive, and so I was waiting there for 105

CHAPTER 2

her. She told me about the conversation that she had with Dr. Aluizio and his proud decision to offer me the opportunity to study. He had only one requirement: that I really dedicate myself to my studies”.51 While in Jaboatao, Paulo’s mother, seeing the signboard of a new school one day, contacted the Director for the job of his secretary. She was a matriculate. Her experiences with a lack of money and material goods had sharpened her sense of deprivation and withered her expectations. Now, with much spirit and hope, she arrived at the high school to speak with its director. The director informed her that so far he had been contacted by three teachers but no student. “It would be my pleasure to have you as my secretary”, said the director with the air of a ViceChancellor, “but I must inform you that during this trial period I won’t have any way to pay you. If things work out, we can discuss your salary”.52 “My mother’s schedule during the initial phase of the high school’s life was from 9 AM to noon and from 2.30 PM to 5 PM”, says Freire. “One day she returned home at 10 AM… Her weary body bore a face filled with suffering, the heart break of a broken dream, an abandoned hope. The Director had closed the high school”.53 “October 31, 1934 SUNDOWN ON A SUNDAY full of blue sky. My father had been suffering from an abdominal aneuerysm for four days. He was suffering intensely and approaching death without sign of an appeal. Even we, the young ones could perceive the end, about which we could do nothing’54, thus wrote Freire about the end of his father when he was only thirteen. Paulo’s mother Edeltrudes suffered the agony of a closed mourning that accentuated the loss many times. The death along with the emotional emptiness with which it left the family meant worsening of the family’s financial condition. The amount of widow pension was quite insignificant. It was only between 1935 and 1936 that things got better when his elder brother Armando got a job in the city hall of Recife; sister Stela also began to work as a first grade teacher. His other brother Temistocles got the job of an errand boy in a business office. Their help, their dedication gave Paulo immeasurble support so that with collaboration of many people, he could do things that he had done55. VII

Paulo Freire and his family lived in Jaboatao for nine years, from April 1932 to May 1941. Thereafter they returned to Recife. At this time, the family was in a far better economic condition. Paulo and his brothers were working as also Stela, his sister. So far as Paulo was concerned, his financial contribution to the family was the lowest as he received only a small salary from teaching Portuguese at Osvaldo Cruz. He earned some money by giving private tuitions. During this period, he was intensely studying the Portuguese and Brazilian grammarians. He used part of his income in purchasing books and journals. This forced him to reduce expenditure on his dresses. In the afternoon, he would stop by those bookstores which were distinguished for their collection. He hunted down second-hand bookshops in search of rare books. The Imperatriz Book Store and National Book Store of Recife were his most favourite ones. 106

PAULO FREIRE

Paulo’s entry into the field of educational philosophy was preceded by his readings of grammar and linguistics. His passion was directed towards understanding the mysteries of language. He avidly read Gilberto Freyre, Machado de Assis, Eça de Queiros, Lins do Rego, Garciliano Ramos, Drummond, Manuel Bandeira etc. In 1947 Paulo joined Social Service of Industry (SESI), the Regional Department of Pernambuco. Here he spent ten years of his life and ‘was involved in the most important political pedagogical practice of my life”56. The job at SESI was for Paulo a re-encounter with working class reality. After his childhood and adolescence at Jaboatao where he was intimately connected with urban and rural children from working-class families, SESI gave him another opportunity to know them and this time to work with them. But before we take up his experience at SESI, we would like to discuss the circumstances in which he decided to join SESI. We find the description in his book Pedagogy of Hope. This book starts with an incident which took place in 1947 when Paulo was teaching Portuguese at Colegio Oswaldo Cruz. It was during this time that Paulo received an invitation to become a part of the recently created Industrial Social Service (or Social Service of Industries) (SESI), of the Regional Department of Pernambuco set up by the National Industrial Confederation. One bright afternoon in Recife, Paulo Rangel Moreira, a close friend of Freire, came to his house and proposed that he be a part of it. Elza, Paulo’s wife, who knew that Paulo loved teaching more than anything else, was apprehensive. “What will Paulo do in that organisation? What will it be able to offer beside the salary he needs? How will he be able to exercise his curiosity, what creative work will he be able to devote himself to so that he won’t die of sadness and longing for a teaching job he likes so much?57 Another equally significant incident also took place at that time. One afternoon Paulo came home with the sensation of someone correcting a mistake he or she was making. Opening the door Elza asked, ‘Everything all right at the office today?’ Paulo really needed someone to talk to about what happened that day; what he had just told the young dentist, a gentleman of his age, whom he met in his new lawyer’s office. “Shy, frightened, nervous, his hands moving as if suddenly unhooked from his mind, detached from his conscious body, and become autonomous and yet unable to do anything ‘on their own’, do anything with themselves, or connect with the words that tumbled out of his mouth”58 – the young dentist had said something to Paulo which he needed to tell his wife. Paulo spoke of what had been “of things experienced, of words, of meaningful silences, of the said, of the heard”59, of the young dentist before him whom he had invited to come to talk to him as his creditor’s attorney. The young man had set up his dental office, at least partially, and had not paid his debts. “‘I made a mistake’, he said. ‘I guess I was overoptimistic. I took out a loan 1 can’t pay back. But I am legally required to have certain instruments in order to practice dentistry. So, well, sir, ... you can take our furniture, in the dining room, the living room...’ And then, laughing a shy laugh, without the trace of a sneer with as much humor as irony – he finished up: ... only you can’t have my eighteenmonth-old baby girl”60. Thus Paulo Freire described his encounter with the dentist. 107

CHAPTER 2

Paulo was listening in silence. He was deeply thinking. Then he told the dentist. “I think you and your wife and your little girl and your dining room and your living room are going to sit in a kind of suspended animation for a while, as far as your debt-troubles are concerned. I am going to have to wait till next week to see my client and tell him I am dropping the case. It will take him another week or so to get another down and outer like me to be his attorney. This will give you a little breathing space, even if it is just suspended animation. I’d also like to tell you that, like you, 1 am closing down my career before it’s even gotten started. Thanks”.61 The youngman, of Paulo’s generation, left his office without much of a grasp of what had been said and heard. He squeezed his cold hands warmly with Paulo’s. That evening, relaying to Elza what had been said, Paulo could never have imagined that one day, so many years later, he would write Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whose discourse, whose proposal had something to do with the experience of that afternoon, in terms of what it too meant and especially in terms of the decision to accept the invitation.62 Paulo analysed that SESI was an intelligent move by the leadership of the dominant class to create a benefactor organisation whose fundamental role would be of providing assistance to the workers in a paternalistic way. The aim was not to encourage even the minimal democratic participation by the workers. It was an attempt to ease class-conflict and stop the development of political and militant consciousness among workers; hence those practices that would stimulate critical knowledge were restricted. It was at SESI, because of its contradiction, that Paulo began to learn that the classes exist in a mutually contradictory relationship. He learned that they have conflicts of interest and are permeated by antagonistic ideologies. The dominant class, according to Paulo, deaf to the need for a critical reading of the world, insists on the purely technical training of the working class. While on the topic of culture of resistance of the working-class, both physical and intellectual, it is worthwhile to recall Paulo’s early experiences in SESI which taught him to respect the position of the working class. We would refer to Paulo’s learning from a working-class leader in a seminar in Recife. Paulo was then working in SESI on relations between schools and families. He had begun to experiment with various avenues for an improvement of the meeting of minds: for an understanding of the educational practice being carried out in the schools, on the part of the families; for an understanding of the difficulties that families from popular areas would have in confronting problems in the implementation of their own educational activity. He was looking for a dialogue from which might result the necessary mutual assistance that would enhance the political connotation of that involvement in the sense of opening channels of democratic participation to fathers and mothers in the actual educational policy being implemented in the schools. We shall deal with his experimentation later. At this moment we would like to describe an incident which deeply affected Paulo’s practice and theory. Paulo says, “Basing my presentation on an excellent study by Piaget on the child’s moral code, his and her mental representation of punishment, the proportion between the 108

PAULO FREIRE

probable cause of punishment and the punishment itself, I spoke at length. I quoted Piaget himself on the subject and argued for a dialogical, loving relationship between parents and children in place of violent punishments.” “My mistake was not in citing Piaget. In fact, how much richer my presentation could have been if I had talked about him very concretely, using a map showing where Recife is, then the Brazilian Northeast, then to move out to the whole of Brazil, show where Brazil is in South America, relate that to the rest of the world, and finally, point to Switzerland, in Europe, the land of the author I was quoting. It would have been not only richer, but more challenging and instructive, to do that. But my actual mistake was, first, in my use of my language, my syntax, without more effort to get close to the language and syntax of my audience; and, second, in my all but oblivion of the hard reality of the huge audience seated before me. “When I had concluded, a man about forty, still rather young but already worn out and exhausted, raised his hand and gave me the clearest and most burning lesson I have ever received in my life as an educator. I do not know his name. I do not know whether he is still alive. Possibly not. The wickedness of the country’s socioeconomic structure, which take on stronger colors in the Brazilian Northcast suffering, hunger, the indifference of the mighty - all this must have swallowed him up long since. “He raised his hand and gave a talk that I have never been able to forget. It seared my soul for good and all. It has exerted an enormous influence on me. Nearly always, in academic ceremonies in which I have had an honorary doctorate conferred on me by some university, I acknowledge how much I owe, as well, to persons like the one of whom I am now speaking, and not only to scholars - other thinkers who have taught me, too, and who continue to teach me, teachers without whom it would have been impossible for me to learn, like the laborer who spoke that night. Actually, were it not for the scientific rigor that offers me greater opportunities for precision in my findings, I should not be able critically to perceive the importance of common sense and the good sense therein residing. In almost every academic ceremony in which I am honoured, I see him standing in one of the aisles of that big auditorium of so long ago, head erect, eyes blazing, speaking in a loud clear voice, sure of himself, making his lucid speech. ‘We have just heard’, he began, ‘some nice words from Dr. Paulo Freire. Fine words, in fact. Well spoken. Some of them were even simple enough for people to understand easily. Others were more complicated. But I think I understood the most important things that all the words together say. ‘Now I would like to ask the doctor a couple of things that I find my fellow workers agree with’. “He fixed me with a mild but penetrating gaze and asked,: ‘Dr. Paulo, Sir, – do you know where people live? Have you ever been in any of our houses, Sir?’ And he began to describe their pitiful houses. He told me of the lack of facilities, of the extremely minimum space in which all their bodies were jammed. He spoke of the lack of resources for the most basic necessities. He spoke of physical exhaustion and of the impossibility of dreams for a better tomorrow. He told me of the prohibition imposed on them from being happy – or even of having hope. 109

CHAPTER 2

“As I followed his discourse, I began to see where he was going to go with it. I was slouching in my chair, slouching because I was trying to sink down into it. And the chair was swiveling, in the need of my imagination, and the desire of my body, which were both in flight, to find some hole to hide in. He paused a few seconds, ranging his eyes over the entire audience, fixed on me once more, and said, ‘Doctor, I have never been over to your house. But I would like to describe it for you, Sir. How many children do you have? Boys or girls?’” “Five”, I said – slouching further down into my chair. “Three girls and two boys”. “Well, doctor, your house must be the only house on the lot, what they call an oitao livre house, a house with a yard. There must be a room just for you and your wife, Sir. Another big room, that’s for the three girls. There’s another kind of doctor, who has a room for every son or daughter. But you are not that kind - no, Sir. You have another room for two boys. A bathroom with running water. A kitchen with Arno appliances. A maid’s room – much smaller than your kids’ rooms - on the outside of the house. A little garden with an ‘ingress’ (the English word) lawn, a front lawn. You must also have a room where you toss your books, Sir - a ‘study’, a library. I can tell by the way you talk that you have done a lot of reading, Sir, and you have got a good memory”. Freire writes: “There was nothing to add or subtract. That was my house. Another world, spacious and comfortable”. “‘Now, Doctor, look at the difference. You come home tired, Sir. I know that. You may even have a headache from the work you do. Thinking, writing, reading, giving these kinds of talks that you are giving now. That tires a person out, too. ‘But, Sir’, he continued ‘it’s one thing to come home, even tired, and find the kids all bathed, dressed up, clean, well-fed, not hungry – and another thing to come home and find your kids dirty, hungry, crying, and making noise. And people have to get up at four in the morning the next day and start all over again – hurting, sad, hopeless. If people hit the kids, and even ‘go beyond bounds’, as you say, it’s not because people don’t love their kids. No, it’s because life is so hard they don’t have much choice’. “This is class knowledge, I say now. “This talk was given about thirty-two years ago. I have never forgotten it. It said to me, despite the fact that I didn’t understand it at that time, much more than it immediately communicated. “In his intonations, his laborer’s syntax and rhythm, the movement of his body, his hands of an orator, in the metaphors so common to popular discourse, he called the attention of the educator there in front of him, seated, silent, sinking down in his chair, to the need, when speaking to the people, for the educator to be up to an understanding of the world the people have. An understanding of the world which, conditioned by the concrete reality that in part explains that understanding, can begin to change through a change in that concrete reality. In fact, that understanding of the world can begin to change the moment the unmasking of the concrete reality begins to lay bare the ‘whys’ of what the actual understanding had been up until then”63 110

PAULO FREIRE

This encounter, though shattered Paulo Freire temporarily, gave him an insight that radically transformed him. He no longer remained a mere educator but an activist who would try to change the world around him – a world constituted of the have-nots - through his crusade for literacy to bring about liberation. Paulo said, “years later, Pedagogy of the Oppressed spoke of the theory that became steeped in practice that night, a night whose memory went with me into exile along with the rememberance of so many other fabrics lived”64 All adult educators worth their salt come across such experiences in their life. What is unique in case of Paulo Freire is the fact that he evolved a theory out of this important experience and significantly changed the role of the educator and the educatee in the domain of adult education – which prompted others to extend the domain still farther. From now onwards the exclusive roles of the educator and the educatee no longer remained valid. The roles interpenetrated, each assuming the other’s role. The educator learned from the educatee and the educatee taught the educator. Especially, in the field of adult education, this new insight gave birth to a theory of knowledge that was non-existent before. Even the process of alphabetisation became radically different. What moved Paulo at SESI required practices contrary to the politics of providing services. Paulo was aware that he could not convert SESI. However, he struggled to construct a democratic school that would stimulate the students’ critical curiosity, which would transcend the educational rigidity which emphasised on memorization rather than realization. He was also proposing to develop an administration that was open to the participation of workers and their families. Paulo hoped that through the process of participation, people would learn the meaning of democracy. They will gather the experience of decision-making, criticism, denunciation and praising. Paulo Freire was heavily influenced by his personal experiences; his relationship with his parents and brothers and sister had a strong democratic character. The environment in which he grew up was characterised by freedom and respect for authority. Because of this personal experience, he recognized a Brazilian past that was highly authoritarian and revolved round the exaggerated power of the master as contrasted with the powerlessness of subordinates, who either accommodated or rebelled. All of this directed him towards democratic schools in which the educators struggled to change the traditionally authoritarian climate of Brazilian education. To involve the parents, Paulo and his co-workers began to prepare, what they called, ‘Thematic Letter’, signed by the teachers and addressed to the parents. A theme would be prepared along with a number of challenging questions. These letters were discussed in seminars attended by both students and their parents. “With the greater participation of parents”, says Paulo Freire, “encouraged by the ability to suggest themes for the meetings and prepare for these meetings, and with the critical involvement of teachers and students, circle attendance by both parents and teachers rose substantially. We also began to observe marked difference in the students’ behaviour in school”.65 Paulo and his co-workers had to confront two major difficulties. The first was in the area of discipline. Because of the authoritarian nature of Brazilian culture, the 111

CHAPTER 2

teachers were asked to be strict disciplinarians. The second difficulty was in the area of literacy. For them, learning how to read and write could be done by no other way than by the traditional ABC primer. As the superintendent of SESI, Paulo Freire made every effort to democratise the school structure by expanding the participation of the educators, educatees and parents. He also fought to raise the salary of the teachers. The administration of the schools was also democratised. Paulo Freire also took steps to organise meetings with nucleus coordinators and their assistants. These meetings evaluated the practice in each area. To decide on the agenda, debates were organised. Thus the coordinators prepared the agenda of the meetings through discussions. Each nucleus would provide suggestions to be studied by directors of divisions. All these suggestions were later discussed in the scheduled meetings. Positive results did not take long to arrive. A better knowledge base was created, concrete possibility of interchange was developed, mutual help was fostered and greater effectiveness of the divisions within each nucleus was achieved. The openness to dialogue led to a better comprehension of the limitations of each of the constituents. Each nucleus had a club and the directorship of the club could be gained only through election. Paulo Freire tried hard to make this directorship a real democratic practice with the participation of workers’ leadership. The SESI clubs used to receive everything from the original divisions, including grants for the festivities, the celebration of May 1 and the sport competition. The regional division would determine how much each club should receive for this or that endeavour. Paulo’s dream was to rupture the top-down structure of patriarchy. Paulo called this the ‘Santa Claus syndrome’. During this period of time, Paulo was convinced of the fundamental importance of education to the process of change. He believed that knowledge would guide this process. Thus, he felt that it was necessary to add educational practice to attempts to expand the sphere of decision-making within the SESI clubs. The educational practice was informed by the stimulus of epistemological curiosity. It was necessary to critically observe the dichotomy between acquiring skills and knowing the raison d’etre behind the technique, between politics and education and between information and education.66 “In reality”, says Freire, “all information holds the possibility of expanding into education if the information is critically received by the informed and not simply swallowed by him or her. Information should communicate through words acting as a link between the content of the communication and its receiver”.67 Information, explains Freire, is communication or generates communication when receivers learn the content of what is communicated in such a way as to transcend the act of receiving. They do this by recreating the received communication and transforming it into knowledge concerning what is communicated. The receiver becomes the subject of the process of communication which, in turn, leads to education as well. Education can only take place when we go beyond the limits of purely utilitarian knowledge. 112

PAULO FREIRE

While working at SESI, Paulo Freire was investigating the relationship between the schools and the families. “I had begun to experiment”, says Paulo Freire, “with various avenues to an improvement of the meeting of minds: to an understanding of the educational practice being carried out in the schools, on the part of the families; to an understanding of the difficulties that families from popular areas would have in confronting problems in the implementation of their own educational activity. At bottom, I was looking for a dialogue between them from which might result the necessary mutual assistance, that, at the same time – as it would imply more involvement of the families in the school – might enhance the political connotation of that involvement in the sense of opening channels of democratic participation to fathers and mothers in the actual educational policy being implemented in the schools”.68 He had carried out by that time a research project concerning around one thousand families of students spread over the areas of Recife, Zona de Mata, and even beyond. SESI had had nuclei or social centres in these areas where members and their families were offered various kinds of assistance. The research had nothing sophisticated about it. He only asked the parents questions about their relationship with their daughters and sons. He asked about punishments, rewards, the most frequent punishments, the most frequent reasons for it, their children’s reaction to the punishment, any change in their behaviour or want thereof, in the direction desired by the person doing the punishing and so on. When Paulo Freire sifted through the results, he was astonished at the emphasis on corporal, violent punishment in Recife, the Zona de Mata, and in the rural areas and hinterland. By contrast he discovered that there was an absolute absence of punishment of children along the fishing coast. “It seemed that”, says Freire, “along the coast, under the maritime sky, the legends of individual freedom, with which the culture is drenched, the fishers’ confrontation in their precarious jangadas or rafts, with the forces of the sea, the independent jobber’s work done by persons free and proud, the imagination that lends such color to the fishers’ fantastic stories – it seemed that all of this had some connection with the taste for a liberty diametrically opposed to the use of violent punishment”.69 This absence of punishment to the child, Paulo discovered, was related to the concept of freedom in the fishers’ community. The researchers delved into the reason why various students were missing school so frequently in the fishing season. Students and parents separately replied that because the children were free, it was for them to decide when they would go to school. This was in sharp contrast to the culture of punishment in other areas. Punishments in these areas ranged from tying a child to a tree, locking them up in a room for hours on end, giving them ‘cakes’ with thick, heavy switches, forcing them to kneel on stones used to grind corn, thrashing them with leather straps. The last was the principal punishment in a town of the Zona de Mata that was famous for its shoe-making. These punishments were meted out to the children with the belief that it would enable the children become hardy to face life. During the process of understanding various kinds of punishment in various communities, Paulo Freire framed some of the important questions that went beyond 113

CHAPTER 2

the relationship between the parents and the child. He says, “One of my concerns at that time, as valid then as it is now, was with the political consequences of that kind of relationship between parents and children, which later becomes that between teachers and pupils, when it came to the learning process of our infant democracy. It was, as if family and school were so completely subjected to the greater context of global society that they could do nothing but reproduce the authoritarian ideology”.70 Here lies the insight of Paulo Freire. He sees in the punishment of children the ref1ection of a tyrannical society. He also found similarity with the punishments meted out in schools. This led to his most important discovery – the restructuring of the relationship between the teacher and the student. He extrapolated it in the realm of knowledge – his famous theory on the banking concept of education – and then in the solution of the contradiction – in dialogue. VIII

The Movement for Popular Culture (MCP) was the first of a series of political educational movements that emerged in the 1960s in Brazil. MCP tried to redeem popular culture by having intellectuals lead the people to revolutionary practice by transforming the country. It was born of the political will of Miguel Arraes, the mayor of Recife. He was helped by a group of workers’ leaders, artists, and other intellectuals. Paulo Freire was one of the founder members. Germano Coelho, a young teacher from Paris, called for the creation of a movement instead of an institute or organisation of popular education and culture. The idea of a movement suggested a process of coming to be, of change and mobility71. MCP, Freire recalls, was an instrument for a dream to be realized, – the dream of transforming Brazil. A part of the movement’s nature was a critical understanding of the role of culture in the educational process; a change in the concept and practice of culture in general and popular culture in particular and to the progressive education of children and adults.72 Brazil’s dominant class, asserts Paulo Freire, does not realize that hunger haunts a significant part of the population. He feels that the Brazilian elite lack the minimum sensitivity to see, if nothing else, the danger to which they expose themselves and the nation by allowing the misery of so many brothers and sisters, let alone being offended as human beings.73 In this context what the sociologist Herbert de Souza (nicknamed Betinho) did was an act of wisdom and hope. Giving assistance so as to create a stimulus, a challenge capable of transforminga an assisted individual of today into the subject of tomorrow, who will take history in hand and remake it in justice, decency and beauty as an act of wisdom and hope. Betinho, says Paulo Freire, knew that we could change the world but he also knew that without practising transformation we would not achieve world intervention. Transformation, he thought, was a process in which the human being is both the subject and the object. It is something that takes place inexorably74. The only weapons the organisers of MCP had were the certainty about the deep injustice of the Brazilian society, the commitment of the activists of MCP to embrace the democratic struggle in defence of human rights and their confidence in progressive education.75 114

PAULO FREIRE

Another objective of the movement was the preservation of popular cultural traditions: the people’s festivals, their stories, their mythic figures and their religiousness. In all these they found not only the resigned expression of the oppressed but also their possible methods of resistance. All the June festivities – the maracatus, the bumba-meu-boi, the caboclinhos, the mamulengo, the fandango, the carpideiras, the cordel literature, the handicrafts, the excellent ceramic sculptures - none of these escaped the notice of MCP.76 The sculptor Abelardo da Hora worked under the shade of trees at the Trinidade Ranch, the headquarters of MCP. His thin figure and strong gaze and his work in an improvised studio with the popular youth left a strong impression on others. He thought that drawing the world, depicting things, using other languages, was not the exclusive privilege of a few. He felt that anyone could make art, which did not mean that all would be remarkable artists. Aesthetics is the very nature of educational practice, meaning one should not be a stranger to beauty. Abelardo da Hora’s work at MCP was a testimony to the confidence in human activity and its ability to transform the world.77 The ideal thing, according to Freire, was to transform the rebellious consciousness into revolutionary consciousness: to be radical without becoming sectarian; to be strategic without becoming cynical; to be skilful without becoming opportunistic; to be ethical without becoming puritanical. The rebellious consciousness of the popular urban masses is terrified, cornered up on the morros or slums, in the favelas or ghettos; the masses face an infection to which they are exposed by the evil of outlaws and police, equally outside the law, who fight for control of the drug traffic.78 The ideal thing would be to promote revolutionary consciousness which despite being more difficult to attain, continues to be essential and possible.79 Paulo Freire brought to MCP everything he had learned at SESI. The circles constituted with the participation of parents and teachers became highly meaningful in the education of the child. To this was added the SESI clubs which helped the workers overcome the patriarchal nature of the organisation. In these democratic practices, the process of discovery was conversational, down to the choice of the word cognition in which to know is not simply to receive knowledge but also to produce it.80 As an offshoot of the adult education project, the cultural circles and cultural centres were born. The latter were large spaces that housed cultural circles, rotating libraries, theatrical presentations, recreational activities and sports events. The cultural circles were spaces where teaching and learning took place in a conversational fashion. These were spaces for knowledge, for knowing, not for knowledge transference; places where knowledge was produced, not simply presented to or imposed on the learner. These were spaces where new hypotheses for reading the world were created.81 The first cultural circles were held in the popular locations throughout Recife. Cultural circles were formed in philanthropic organisations, soccer clubs, neighbourhood associations and churches. The educators were in charge. They would visit the club or church and talk about the possibility of pedagogical work. If the proposal 115

CHAPTER 2

was accepted, MCP would then promote the activities using popular resources. News would spread through the word of mouth. Once two or three circles had thus been formed, the educators would make a thematic assessment among the participants. As a team, at the movement headquaters, the organisers would analyse the assessment. Once addressed, they would develop the themes and organize a programme to be discussed with the participants of the circle. The number of meetings varied from circle to circle as a function of the different possibilities and the interests of the circle members. Nationalism, democracy, development, imperialism, voting rights of illiterates, agrarian reform, money transfers from abroad, exclusion from education were some of the themes that made up the universe of curiosity in popular areas around Recife in the 1960s. The effectiveness of these works, the interest generated, the liveliness of discussions, the critical curiosity and learning ability that the groups demonstrated, made the organisers think about developing concrete schemes with focus on adult literacy. The results of the cultural circle activities within MCP repeated the methodological success of dialogical activities developed at SESI. Comparing the activities of SESI and MCP, Paulo Freire says, “If one thinks about my time at SESI, – the political, pedagogical practice about which there was never a lack of critical reflection and always an intensive reading of extensive literature – one realizes how the MCP principles and dreams were the same as mine. They handed to me an excellent field of activity. Activity that was an expansion of other activities lived out in a different place at a difterent time, the SESI time and space. One difference, though, was that SESI was a possible contradiction while at MCP I was a fortunate coincidence”82 On the basis of his research work and experience at SESI and MCP, Paulo Freire made the following observations on adult literacy practice: 1. Literacy education is an act of knowing, an act of creating, and not the act of mechanically memorizing letters and syllables. 2. Literacy education must challenge learners to take on the role of subjects in learning both reading and writing. 3. Literacy education must originate from research about the vocabulary universe of the learners, which also gives the thematic universe. The first codifications to be ‘read’, decodified, by the learners offer possibilities to discuss the concept of culture. To understand culture as a human creation, an extension of the world by men and women through their work, helps to overcome the politically tragic experience of immobility caused by fatalism. If men and women can change, through action and technology (whether incipient or sophisticated), the physical world, which they did not create, why can’t they change the world of history – social, economic and political – which they did create? 4. Literacy education must be characterized by dialogue as a path to knowledge, which does not invalidate informative discourse, without which there is no knowledge. 5. Literacy education must codify and ‘read’ generative words, allowing for the creation of a number of sentences with the words. Only after long experimentation 116

PAULO FREIRE

with sentence creation, using generative words in different positions and functions can the work of decodifying words into syllables begin, followed by combining syllables into new words and from there to new sentences. 6. Literacy education must not dichotomize reading and writing. One does not exist without the other, and is fundamental to exercise both systematically. Moreover, learning to write and read must also help improve oral expression, thus the need for exercising both. 7. Literacy education must be premised on remembering what it means for thirty or forty-year-old adults, used to the weight of work instruments, to manipulate pencils. At the beginning of this new experience, there may be some discrepancy between the strength exerted and the strength of the pencil. Adults must become reconditioned, little by little, through repeated practice. 8. Literacy education must also be premised on remembering the insecurity of illiterate adults, who will become upset if they feel, they are being treated like children. There is no more effective way to respect them than to accept their experiential knowledge for the purpose of going beyond it. Working with learners to create a climate of confidence in which they feel secure is beneficial to the learning process.83 At MCP, along with the experiments already mentioned, was the popular theatre project. It created a mobile circus that went from neighbourhood to neighbourhood offering theatrical presentations and movies. After the presentation, several educators would come on the stage to discuss with the audience their observations. It generated a lot of enthusiasm among the oppressed classes. The Cultural Extension Service (SEC) of the University of Recife was born out of a dream of its President, Dr. Joao Alfredo Gonzales de Costa Lima and of Paulo Freire.84 They discussed the possibility of breaking through the University’s four walls and extending into non-academic areas among the schooled populations, including pre-college students and public school teachers, and also extending to potential clientele in popular areas such as union leaders or the illiterate. A university, thought Freire, must orbit around two fundamental concerns from which others would derive and which would relate to the cycle of knowledge. This cycle should have two moments which would be in permanent relationship: one is the moment when we learn about existing knowledge; the other is the moment when we produce new knowledge. The moment when we learn about existing knowledge is predominantly of teaching and learning, and the moment when we produce new knowledge is predominantly that of research. However, all teaching implies research and all research implies teaching.85 A university, furthermore, must increasingly become a creation of the city and expand its influence over the whole city. The university that is foreign to its context does not speak the context. It speaks a distant context, an alien context. It is unfair, and blind, says Freire, for a university to serve only the elite, to offer it excellence, while doing nothing to improve the standard of basic education. In a democratic and non-elitist university, epistemological demands are different – deeper and wider.86 117

CHAPTER 2

No context can grow if we only touch it partially. The development of a region demands the critical and intellectual education of its majority, not only a selfish and self-centred elite. The university that suffers a weak local and regional context, with the largest deficiencies in basic education, should have in its department of education, areas seriously devoted to the permanent development of educators.87 Therefore, if the university context is high rates of illiteracy, with underprepared basic education teachers, the university cannot refuse to improve the situation. For this reason, from June 1963 until April 1964, the SEC of Recife University participated directly in the work carried out by National Literacy Mission (PNA), under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Culture.88 Several projects had started: the agreement with the State Government in Rio Grande do Norte that made possible the experience in Angicos; the cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Culture to educate teams responsible for literacy programmes all over the country; the extension programmes for high school students from private schools in Recife; the courses in debating education and contemporary Brazilian issues with students from normal schools in Recife; the courses on the Brazilian reality and popular education offered to various groups involved in popular education programmes etc. There were other projects in the agenda: projects geared toward Africa and dialogue with union leaders to make the time and space to grow together by debating the reality. To realize these programmes in practice, Paulo Freire and his colleagues visited the important institutions in Recife, including agencies like Superintendence of the Development of Northeast (Sudene), headed by the renowned Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, and Rural Social Service under the direction of Prof. Lauro Borba. One important area of cooperation was SEC-MCP joint action. The cultural circles already set up and working in popular areas called for their expansion and reinforcement, transforming them, little by little, into Popular Institutes of Brazilian Studies (ISEB). Paulo Freire conducted an experiment on literacy at Poco da Pamela. Here Paulo experienced the emotion felt when a literacy student named Joaquim wrote his first word ‘NINA’ and exploded into nervous uncontrolled laughter. Paulo says that, that moment rich in humanity was lived by him intensely as an educator. He shared the happiness of someone who wrote, for the first time, his wife’s name.89 Programme at Angicos This incident led to the organisation of literacy classes in Rio Grande do Norte. The project was financed by Alliance for Progress. The funding as well as the project depended on the following conditions: 1. A cooperation agreement between Rio Grande do Norte’s State Government and the University of Recife to be written up. 2. The agreement should specify that the State Department of Education be responsible for the expenses due to transportation, meals, accommodation and honorarium of the team members accompanying Paulo Freire to Natal. 118

PAULO FREIRE

3. The State Government should pay for Paulo Freire’s transport and accommodation. He would accept no honorarium. There were other clauses too. Only Alliance for Progress was a contradiction. They withdrew their support before the project came to a conclusion. The experiment at Angicos has been described by many authors, including Moacir Gadotti. In 1963 Alliance for Progress entered into a number of agreements in the educational area with the State government of Aluisio Alves, in the Northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte. Paulo Freire was approached by the Secretary of Education about the possibility of using his method there. A team coordinated by the law student Marcos Guerra went to Natal, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, to train a number of teachers. Thereafter they went to Angicos to work on the vocabulary universe of the region with a view to initiate the literacy work. The team lived there. Within one and half months 300 formerly illiterate people could read and write. The Angicos experiment received wide publicity. President Joao Goulart paid a visit there accompanied by the members of his cabinet. He actually heard a former illiterate person read out from a daily newspaper. The President and his minister of Education, Paulo de Tarso Santos, invited Paulo Freire to take charge of the national literacy programme. Freire conceived of 20,000 cultural circles so that two million people could be made literate in 1964. This and other pro-people actions of the Government infuriated the ruling class. A military coup took place. Paulo Freire was arrested. He was released after 70 days of imprisonment. IX

At the peak of his career, when Paulo Freire was given the responsibility to make millions of people literate he was the Chairman of the National Literacy Mission. At this time, he suffered enormous reverses. Following the coup by the armed forces, Freire was imprisoned and kept in detention for 70 days and physically and mentally tortured until he was allowed to go into exile. Though this tragedy influenced adversely the scheme of things in Brazil, it also ushered in a new era of creativity for Paulo. He was able to work in a new land, with a new people, and among new subjects of his experimentation. What was field-tested in Brazil proved equally effective in Chile. Thus local became global, what could perhaps have remained restricted within the geographical confines of Brazil, became objects of experimentation on a wider scale. In the language of Grundtvig, what was lost internally was redeemed externally. Says Paulo Freire, “No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile – not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a 119

CHAPTER 2

time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected - which, as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal of risk”90 “…One of the serious problems of the man or woman in exile,” says Freire, “is how to wrestle, tooth and nail, with feelings, desire, reason, recall, accumulated knowledge, worldviews, with the tension between a today being lived in a reality on loan and a yesterday, in their context of origin, whose fundamental marks they come here charged with”. “At bottom,” argues Paulo, “the problem is how to preserve one’s identity in the relationship between an indispensable occupation in the new context and a preoccupation in which the original context has to be reconstituted. How to wrestle with the yearning without allowing it to turn into nostalgia. How to invent new ways of living, and living with others, thereby overcoming or redirecting an understandable tendency on the part of the exiled woman or man always to regard the context of origin (as it cannot be got rid of as a reference at least not over the long haul) as better than the one on loan.” “Sometimes”, feels Paulo, “it is actually better.”91 What is described above is the gist of Paulo’s accumulated experience in exile spent over a period of twenty years or so. Paulo Freire’s first residence in exile was Bolivia. But Bolivia, situated at an attitude of 4200 metres above the sea level, with an oxygen content in air so low that he could not breathe properly, did not host Paulo for long. Bolivia, the country where Ernesto Che Guevara waged his last guerrilla warfare in 1966, experienced a military take over in 1964, a short time after Paulo Freire was granted asylum there. Bolivia went through a genuine revolutionary transformation in 1952 when Paz Estenssoro, leader of Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) came to power. A far–reaching nationalization program took possession of the mines. A thoroughgoing land reform gave land to the peasants. A decree was issued on October 2, 1953 to complete the process of handing over the land to the peasants legally. After four years in power, Paz Estenssoro, in a genuinely fair election, handed over presidency to his colleague Siles Suazo in 1956. After Siles’ four years in power, Paz Estenssoro again fought the election and won on behalf of MNR. This time also, he completed his term in office although during this latter tenure he alienated himself from the workers and peasants and moved to the right. In 1964, after his second term in office, power got better of him and he wanted to hold on to power by amending the constitution which stipulated that one person could not be elected twice consecutively. The army, a staunch enemy of Paz Estenssoro, took a quick decision to launch a coup in the name of defending the constitution. It was November 1964.92 Freire writes, “I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 1964, and another coup d’etat took me by surprise. In November of the same year I landed in Arica, in Chile, where I startled my fellow passengers, as we were making our descent toward the airport, by calling out, loud and strong, “Long live oxygen!” I had left an altitude of four thousand meters and was returning to sea level. My body once more became as viable as it had been before. I moved with facility, rapidly, without 120

PAULO FREIRE

exhaustion. In La Paz, carrying a package, even a little one, meant an extraordinary effort for me. At forty three, I felt old and decrepit. In Arica, and on the next day in Santiago, I got my strength back, and everything happened almost instantly, as if by a sleight of hand. Long live oxygen!”93 The Chilean Background Paulo Freire arrived in Chile in November 1964 and stayed there until April 1969.Recent researches94 have claimed that the Chilean experience was fundamental for the maturing of Freire’s thoughts. Four major reasons have been put forth. First, Freire conducted in Chile the most sustained educational practice of his sixteen years of exile (1964–1980). This included direct involvement in research that led to the development of adult literacy training materials, and in the training of staff working in literacy programmes and agrarian reform initiatives. He also taught at the university. Second, Freire wrote some of the most important texts like Education as the Practice of Freedom, Extension or Communication? Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Sobre la Accion Cultural, and the first eight chapters of The Politics of Education. Freire calculated that during one and half years in Chile, he wrote around 1,600 pages. Third, some of the most important and enduring contributions in educational theory and practice of Freire were put forth in these works: Banking Concept of Education, Problem-posing Education, Culture of Silence, etc. Fourth, Pedagogy of the Oppressed marked a qualitative shift in Freire’s pedagogical thoughts in the sense that he abandoned much of his developmentalistic thinking on education and embraced a more profoundly political nature of education. Holst claimed that his analysis of the collected data revealed four major interrelated themes regarding the impact of the Chilean sociopolitical economic context on Freire’s pedagogical and ideological development: The general political climate was conducive to Freire’s development. The agrarian reform process emphasized adult literacy and conscientisation as ways to integrate the peasantry into the general process of rural modernization and to organize the peasantry into cooperatives and unions. The specific work that Freire did with the Instituto de Capacitacion e Investigacion en Reforma Agraria (Institute for Training and Research in Agrarian Reform or ICIRA) team challenged him to reassess the philosophical foundation of his earlier work. Through the ICIRA work, Freire entered into a dialectical relationship with mostly the young and radical collaborators. This interaction significantly influenced Freire’s thoughts and in his own radicalization. When Freire arrived in Chile in November 1964, Eduardo Frei, the first Christian Democratic president, was assuming power. Freire immediately moved to Santiago, the Chilean capital, where he was united with other Brazilian exiles. He met Jacques Chonchol, the then executive vice-president of Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario (Institute for Agrarian and Livestock Development or INDAP). 121

CHAPTER 2

Chonchol had heard of Paulo Freire’s work in Brazil from Brazilians like Pablo de Tarso. Chonchol had written previously about the need of a multipronged approach in agrarian reform – it included literacy, technical training and modernization of the agricultural sector. The purpose of INDAP was to provide a multifaceted technical assistance to the peasants through organizing peasants’ cooperatives and rural unions. Freire’s work, as he involved himself in INDAP, focused on the training of literacy workers and agrarian technicians. Freire travelled extensively for this purpose to acquaint himself with the socio-economic and political condition of the Chilean peasants – their thematic universe. Agricultural Sector Chile had to spend a large sum of money, around 400 million dollars95 a year on food, in 1970s. The country was poorly cultivated because of its archaic property structure. Though Chile had more arable land per head than that of California, Sweden or Switzerland, its agricultural production was half that of Switzerland, and only a third that of California though climatically they shared similar conditions. Vast holdings, fundos of 5,000 hectares and haciendas of 10,000 were common. It was estimated that 600 Chileans owned 60 per cent of the country’s arable land. This tiny body of wealthy landowners were not interested in farming and lived in the urban centres as absentee landlords. In this inefficient system of the colonial fundo, the labour was provided by the inquilinos who lived in the proprietors’ land in adobe huts. Inquilinos, small farmers and agricultural workers, made up around half a million people. Their average wage was 60 cents. The Eduardo Frei government’s plan for agrarian reform, passed by parliament on 21 February 1967, applied to all properties containing more than 80 hectares of irrigated land. Two state bodies were given the responsibility of putting the reform in practice: CORA and INDAP. CORA was to purchase land and manage and INDAP was to prepare peasants for the changes and technological developments upon which the new structures depended. In practice, however, the reform was very modest. Says Richard Gott, in 1972, a year before the military coup, “… by the end of the reform process, when 50 per cent of the country’s productive land will be in the hands of the state, only about 12 per cent of the rural labour force will be located there. Most of the country’s peasants are not directly affected by the reform. Indeed, more than 30 per cent are smallholders with insufficient land to meet their needs—let alone produce a surplus for the market.”96 Instead of resettling 100,000 families on land of their own, Frei managed to bestow farms only to 11,200 families. The goals of the Frei administration’s agrarian reform program were as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

To grant lands to thousands of peasants To increase agricultural production To increase peasants’ income and living standard To obtain the peasants’ active participation in the national affairs.

122

PAULO FREIRE

To meet the goals of the Agrarian Reform, the Frei administration encouraged formation of rural trade unions and cooperatives. Paulo Freire’s foremost responsibility was assisting in the INDAP activities to prepare the peasants for the social and technological changes as consultant. Freire met Waldemar Cortes, the then head of the newly created Jefatura Nacional de Planes Extraordinarios de Educacion de Adultos (National Directorate for Special Planning in Adult Education or JNPEEA) in early 1965.Cortes was responsible for the development of the Natiional Literacy Campaign, a program instrumental for INDAP and part of the government’s “Integral Reform of Chilean Education”. The programme was officially launched in March 1966.Freire volunteered his services to help develop the generative themes and the literacy manual. The method employed in the literacy campaign was Freirean in nature though the manual was prepared by a team under the direct supervision of Cortes. In Chile the metodo Paulo Freire was called psycho-social method which was a synthesis of Freire’s Brazilian experience with specific Chilean cultural traditions. Before the advent of the Frei administration, adult literacy primers such as Silabario Hispano Americano, a primer for children, was used for the adults. Freire’s method of imparting literacy through the generative words culled from the vocabulary universe of the adults and embedded in the social, economic and cultural conditions of the learners, began to be relied upon after Freire joined the campaign. The eleven codifications used in Brazil were reduced to eight in Chile. The Chileans preferred more practice in literacy as their political consciousness was presumably more matured than that of the people in Brazil. As already mentioned, a significant part of Freire’s work was in the area of agrarian reform. Beside INDAP and JNPEEA, Freire began to work at ICIRA which was a joint project of the Chilean government, United Nations Development Programme and United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation. Freire was working on a UN contract. The objective of ICIRA was to impart training for the specialists involved in the agrarian reform process. Freire conducted courses for the technicians working in agrarian reform and also led an interdisciplinary team of young Chilean professionals. Marcela Gajardo, one of Freire’s associates at the time, writes that the main task of ICIRA was to research the thematic universe of the peasants from which the peasant training program was to be developed.97 The Chilean experience positively influenced Freire’s outlook which was later reflected in his theoretical contributions. The general political climate of Chile during 1964-1969 was conducive to his growth and ideological maturation. ‘Chile’, said Marcela, ‘provided Paulo with the possibility to internationalize himself and to internationalize his thinking’.98 While doing this work, Freire developed close relationship with many young Chileans as they went through a process of radicalization along with the radicalization of the peasants in the countryside. Many activists of the Christian Democratic Party dissociated themselves from the parent organization and formed the Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitario (People’s Unitary Action Movement or MAPU) and the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria or MIR). Notable among them was Jacques Chonchol who was the 123

CHAPTER 2

Vice-President of INDAP and later became the Secretary General of MAPU, one of the constituent parties of the Popular Front led by Salvador Allende and the Minister of Agriculture of his cabinet. Rolando Pinto Conteras who joined ICIRA as a youngman (he broke with the Christian Democratic Party) identified a kind of dialectical relationship between the radical pedagogical stance of Paulo Freire and the organizational process of the peasant movement. He also refers to Paulo Freire’s method of conscientization which turned out to be a great weapon towards political education that served the most radical sectors in bringing about a critical political formation which later became MIR and MAPU.Paulo Freire himself underwent a political transformation and espoused radical thoughts of revolutionary ideology especially Marxism. Reflecting on Freire’s field work, Jacques Chonchol remarked that he became very conscious of the situation of the peasants in general and of the need to organize them through technical and ideological training. Chonchol refers to Freire’s resorting to “the method of twenty words” in a more universal training program. At INDAP, training was conducted for forming cooperatives, unions and associations and also to enhance the cultural level of the peasants. Freire worked hard in this whole gamut of activities.99 The agrarian reform process was not smooth as will be evident from the account of a Soviet journalist who visited Chile during Allende’s time: “From Taife we returned to Temuco where we were to be received by Jacques Chonchol, the Minister of Agriculture in the Popular Unity government. At the beginning of 1971, he had moved his ministry and its staff to Cautin, a province which was to become a proving ground for the democratic land reform. “A tall slender young man dressed in the sports shirt, Jacques Chonchol received us in a small mansion, his temporary residence. The mansion was heavily guarded. During our conversation people were standing beneath the windows watching the road carefully. Any minute one could expect a submachine-gun burst from the roof of an opposite house or from a passing car. Like in other agricultural provinces the situation in Cautin was uneasy. Large landholders had set up an underground organization which tried to foment an uprising. Armed groups of declassed elements were rife up and down the province, launching provocative attacks on the estates and seizing them. These unlawful seizures were welcome grist to the reactionary press. The rightists tried to scare the small and medium landholders with the threat of the allegedly inevitable expropriation of their holdings. Their aim was to demoralize the peasants, to make them give up cultivating their lands since, so the rightists assured the peasants, they would be taken away from them anyway”.100 Says Marcela Gajardo, “There was a process of change in which the groups most excluded from the social riches and benefits could organize themselves to fight for realization of some rights and fulfillment of some basic necessities…. Nevertheless, the evolution of this proposition ran parallel with the sharpening of the contradictions inherent in a model of development that was incapable of satisfying the aspirations and demands of the popular sectors, combined with the fact, evident by the end of 1960s, that the situation of backwardness and marginality of some 124

PAULO FREIRE

segments of the population were problems of a structural nature, inherent to a peripheral capitalism in full process of modernization.”101 Gajardo writes further, “…conscientization, as it appeared in Freire’s initial writings, no longer corresponded theoretically or methodologically to the new realities of Latin American educational and popular cultural movements…. Paulo addressed these criticisms when he indicated that he had already started to worry about the use of the word ‘conscientization’ from the time in Chile…… in this change of perspective, (Freire) defined ‘in class terms what he previously understood in terms of humans’.”102 Holst says, “It is in this sense that we can understand Freire’s ideological and pedagogical development as both a process of maturation and radicalization in Chile.As the popular movements radicalized in Chile, Freire began to realize that his earlier humanistic analysis insufficiently explained movements that were clearly of a class nature. His further ideological development, then, increasingly incorporated Marxist categories and analysis. While never dropping his humanism, it became a Marxist humanism.”103 Freire himself said of his earlier work, “….certainly there were a lot of naivete… that is more or less clear in my first book. …But the political character of education already comes out in this first book… A month or two after being exiled, I had already changed completely. My experience of exile politicized me intensely. It was Chile, moreover, that did that.”104 Freire’s acquaintance with Marxist literature is also apparent from Contreras’ recollections: “…I remember, for example, the first time I took a text of Rosa Luxemburg’s to the discussion of ICIRA group. I remember precisely that I took a work by Rosa Luxemburg in which she vindicates the trade union as the natural place where political cells must be organized. So I remember bringing that for the first time and the wonderful discussion which broke out within the team that had been discussing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So I kept taking other Marxist texts to the team, which in my political conceptualization opened Freire to a more political reflection, it didn’t close him in an exclusively cultural pedagogical dimension.”105 The same opinion is echoed in the words of Marcela: “I think that is where Paulo evolved the most in conceptual terms. It is there where he undertook wider readings. It is there where he really searched for a broader foundation for his methodological strategy, a much broader conceptual framework. It is there where he read Gramsci and deepened his reading of Hegel. He reviewed the ideas of ISEB, of those Brazilian philosophers who had worked on the idea of conscientization. He also reviewed his previous readings.”106 The growing sophistication in Freire’s outlook as a result of his involvement with the developments in the Chilean countryside resulted in such texts as Extension or Communication? and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. X

Santiago became Paulo’s home away from home. Says Paulo Freire, “Only in midJanuary of 1965 were we all back together. Elza, the three girls and the two boys, 125

CHAPTER 2

with all their terrors, their doubts, their hopes, their fears, their knowledge gotten and being gotten, started a new life with me again in a strange land - a foreign land to which we were giving ourselves in such wise that it was receiving us in a way that the foreignness was turning into comradeship, friendship, siblingship. Homesick as we were for Brazil, we had a sudden special place in our hearts for Chile, which taught us Latin America in a way we had never imagined.”107 Chile had just got the democratic government of Eduardo Frei of the Christian Democratic Party. There was a climate of euphoria in the streets of Santiago. It was, as if, a profound, radical and substantial transformation of the society had occurred. There was an air of certitude among the activists of the Christian Democratic Party that their revolution was fixed on solid grounds, that no threat could ever get near it. One of their favourite arguments, more metaphysical than historical, was their belief that the Chilean Armed Forces would always value the democratic and constitutional tradition of Chile. Arriving fresh from two putsches, one in his native land Brazil and the other in Bolivia, Paulo Freire was not a little amused at such certitude of his colleagues in Chile. “We argued”, says Freire, “that the so-called tradition of loyalty on the part of the armed forces to the established, democratic order was not an immutable quality, an intrinsic property of the military, but a mere ‘historical given’, and therefore that this ‘tradition’ might become historically shattered and a new process take its place”.108 Chile was only a few years behind Brazil to witness one of the bloodiest military coups in recent history. The darkness at noon descended in Chile in September 1973. Paulo Freire worked in Chile from November 1964 to 1969. It was a highly satisfying and creative period for Paulo. Chile was also an ideal country during this period where one could observe the gradual empowerment of the common people and the resultant fury of the propertied classes. Writes Freire, “I visited Chile twice during the time of the Popular Unity Government and used to say, in Europe and in the United States, that anyone who wanted to get concrete idea of the class struggle, as expressed in the most divergent ways, really ought to pay a visit to Chile. Especially, if you wanted to see, – practically touch with your hands - the tactics the dominant classes employed in the struggle, and the richness of their imagination when it came to waging a more effective struggle for the resolution of the contradiction between power and government, I would tell my audiences, you really must go to Chile. What had happened is that power, as a fabric of relations, decisions and force, continued to be the main thing with them, while the Government, which was in charge of policy, found itself being propelled by progressive forces, forces in discord with the others. This opposition, this contradiction, had to be overcome, so that both power and government would be in their hands again. The coup was the solution”.109 “From November 1964 to April 1969”, says Freire, “I followed the ideological struggle closely. I witnessed, sometimes with surprise, retreats in the area of political ideology by persons who had proclaimed their option for the transformation of society, then became frightened and repentant and made a fearful about-face in midcourse and turned into hidebound reactionaries. But I also saw the advances 126

PAULO FREIRE

made by those who confirmed their progressive discourse by walking consistently, refusing to run from history. I likewise witnessed the progress of persons whose initial position had been timid, to say the least, but who became stronger, ultimately to assert themselves in a radicalness that never extended to sectarianism”110 It would really have been impossible, says Freire, to experience a process this rich, this problem-fraught, to have been touched so profoundly by the climate of accelerated change, to have shared in such animated lively discussion in the ‘culture circles’ in which educators often had to beg the peasants to stop, since they had already gone on practically the whole night, without all of this later winning explication in this or that theoretical position of mine in the book that, at the time, was not even a project.111 “I was impressed”, continues Freire, “when I heard about it in evaluation meetings or when I was actually present, by the intensity of the peasants’ involvement when they were analysing their local and national reality. It took them what seemed like forever to spill everything that was on their minds. It was as if the ‘culture of silence’ was suddenly shattered, and they had discovered not only that they could speak, but that their critical discourse upon the world, their world, was a way of remaking that world. It was as if they had begun to perceive that the development of their language, which occurred in the course of their analysis of their reality, finally showed them that the lovelier world to which they aspired was being announced, somehow anticipated, in their imagination. It was not a matter of idealism. Imagination and conjecture about a different world than the one of oppression, are as necessary to the praxis of historical ‘subjects’ (agents) in the process of transforming reality as it necessarily belongs to human toil that the worker or artisan first have in his or her head a design, a ‘conjecture’, of what he or she is about to make. Here is one of the tasks of democratic popular education, of a pedagogy of hope: that of enabling the popular classes to develop their language: not the authoritarian, sectarian gobbledygook of “educators” but their own language - which, emerging from and returning upon their reality, sketches out the conjectures, the designs, the anticipations of their new world. Here is one of the central questions of popular education - that of language as a route to the invention of citizenship”.112 As Jacques Chonchol’s consultant in the Institute for the Development of Animal Husbandry, in the area of what was then called in Chile, Human Promotion, Paulo was able to extend his collaboration to the Ministry of Education, in cooperation with people working in adult literacy, and to the Corporation for Agrarian Reform.113 Sometime later, Paulo Freire began to work as a consultant for these organisations. He was then working with UNESCO also. As consultant for these organisations, Paulo Freire travelled extensively all over the country. He used to be accompanied by progressive young Chileans. He discussed issues pertaining to the country’s reality with the peasants. He used to urge upon the agronomists and agricultural technologists to develop a political, pedagogical and democratic understanding of their practice. He also debated general problems of educational policy with the educators of the cities and towns. All these resulted in his beautiful pamphlet, “Extension or Communication?” which charted an alternative path towards comprehensive development. 127

CHAPTER 2

Once, in the company of a UN Dutch sociologist, Paulo Freire went to a remote corner of Chile to attend a peasants’ meeting to discuss agrarian reform. The peasants had been discussing their right to the land, their right to the freedom to produce, to raise crops and livestock, to live decently, to be. They had defended their right to be respected as persons and as workers who were creators of wealth and they had demanded their right of access to culture and knowledge. “With the meeting over”, says Paulo, “as we were leaving the wagon shed where it had been held, my Dutch friend with the red beard put his hand on my shoulder and said – choosing his phrases carefully and speaking with conviction: ‘It’s been worth four days of wandering through these corners of Chile, to hear what we heard tonight’. And he added good-humouredly, ‘These peasants know more than we do’.”114 On another occasion Paulo went to a group of Chilean peasants and intended to start a dialogue with them. At one time, one of the peasants said, “Excuse us for talking. You are the one who should have been talking, sir. You know things, sir, we don’t”.115 Paulo describes how, in Chile, he would play a game to prove that the peasants were also quite knowledgeable in their own area of functioning as a professor knows his or her area. It would generate self-confidence in the peasants that they also knew – the two ‘moments’ of the same position – culture of silence and its disapearance through dialogue. The dialogue of the educator with those to be educated in order to locate the reasons why some people have an opportunity and some others do not, which Paulo Freire terms as ‘codification’, eloquently demonstrates the universal nature of the ‘culture of silence’ and its disapearance through dialogue. Paulo’s theoretical formulation of the concept and its practical demonstration have been found to be valid all over the world. The present author had, on many occasions, actually talked to persons suffering from the culture of silence in his adult education activities in the South 24 Pargans District of West Bengal, India. Writes Paulo Freire: “The last period of my time in Chile – to be precise, the period during which I worked in the Institute for Ways and Means and Research in Agrarian Reform (ICIRA), from the beginning of my third year in the country onward – was one of the most productive moments of my experience in exile. In the first place, I came to this organisation only after having already acquired a certain visceral familiarity with the culture of the country, the habits of its people and with the rifts in political ideology within Christian Democracy already clear”.116 While working at lClRA, Paulo came under attack from the Christian Democratic Party’s rightist section. Paulo explained that he had never transgressed the moral and ethical boundary and never participated in the party politics of the country that gave him asylum. However, on being informed of the dissent of his detractors, Paulo Freire began to keep a written record of what he said in his speeches. “Along with becoming accustomed to writing them out, 1 got into the habit of discussing them, every time I could, with two great friends I worked with in the lClRA, Marcela Gajardo, a Chilean, today a researcher and professor at the Faculdade Latino – Americana de Ciencias Sociais, and sociologist Jose Luiz Fiori, a Brazilian, today a professor at Rio de Janeiro University”, says Paulo Freire. 128

PAULO FREIRE

“The hours we spent together, discussing discoveries, and not just my talks, talking over our doubts, wondering together, challenging ourselves, recommending readings, being surprised, being fearful, exerted such a spell on us that, nearly always, the time of day came when our conversation was the only one to be heard in the building. Everyone else had left the office, and there we were, trying to get a better understanding of what was behind a peasant’s reply to a challenge with which he had been presented in a culture circle”117. One can feel the excitement through which Paulo was going in Chile during this period. During his time with the Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuaria, the Ministry of Education and the Corporation for Agrarian Reform, and his work with the technological teams, he found it possible to have a rich experience almost throughout the country, with countless peasant committees, interviewing their leaders. All these experiences clarified many of the doubts he had before. The Brazilian experience led Paulo Freire to develop certain hypotheses about the process of adult learning; the Chilean opportunity allowed him to confirm or reject some of them and helped him to come to a more perfect understanding of the phenomena. “I think that,” writes Freire, “an interesting point to begin with might be the actual creation or procreation of the book. Pedagogy of the Oppressed enwraps the procreation of ideas, of course, but thereby it enfolds as well the moment or the moments of activity in which those ideas were generated, together with the moments at which they were put down on paper. Indeed, ideas that need to be argued to – which imply other ideas, ideas that have come to be restated in various ‘corners’ of texts to which authors feel obliged to return from time to time – become generated throughout these authors’ practice within the greater social practice of which the ideas are a part. It is in this sense that I have spoken of the memories that I brought into exile, of which some had been formed in childhood long ago, but are still of genuine importance today for an understanding of my understanding or of my reading of the world. This is also the reason why I have spoken of the exercise to which I always devoted myself in exile – wherever the “loan context” was, the context in which, as I gained experience in it, I thought and rethought my relations with and in the original context. But as ideas, positions, to be made explicit and explained, to be argued in the text, have first seen the light of day in the action – reflection – action in which we are enwrapped (as we are touched by memories of happenings in old fabrics), thus the moment of writing becomes as a time of creation and re-creation, as well, of the ideas with which we come to our desk.”118 Thus Freire explains how he writes and says that the time of writing is always preceded by one of speaking out the ideas that will be set down on paper. “I spent a year or more” writes Paulo, “talking about aspects of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I spoke with friends that visited me, I discussed it in seminars and courses. One day my daughter Madalena came to me to delicately call my attention to something. She suggested greater restraint on my eagerness to talk about the asyet-unwritten Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I did not have the strength to abide by her suggestion. I continued, passionately, to speak of the book as if, – and as a matter of fact this was true – I was learning to write it”.119 129

CHAPTER 2

During his trips and visits to the various places across the world, Paulo Freire was able to verify various psychological traits of the oppressed people, their ‘willingness’ or ‘cunningness’ in adverse situations. He saw and heard things in New York that he had experienced in Brazil and Chile. And thus Freire could universalise these experiences and theorize them. He mentions his discussion with Ivan Illich and Eric Fromm and quotes Fromm, “This kind of educational practice is a kind of historico-cultural, political psychoanalysis”.120 Freire reminisces how, in the United States, he spoke for the first time about his forthcoming book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In these talks he tested some of his hypotheses, particularly his concept of ‘fear of freedom’. Flight from the real, an attempt to ‘tame’ the real through concealment of the truth were the essence of this concept. He also tested the hypothesis regarding assimilation and interiorization of the dominant ideology by the dominated themselves – an expression he used in Pedagogy of the Oppressed thus: “inhabiting’ and dominating the half-defeated body and soul of the oppressed one.121 While working on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire began to use ‘index cards’, titling and numbering each one of them according to the nomenclature. Whenever an idea would occur to him, he would jot down the same in a pocket notebook to be included later in the card index. In many instances, the kind of issues that challenged him and about which he wrote in the index card were statements or questions, either of peasants with whom he had came into contact or of agronomists, agriculturists or others whom he had met in seminars and meetings. Like Freud, Freire meticulously used ‘common sense’ only to go beyond it. Says Paulo Freire, “Just as it is unacceptable to advocate an educational practice that is satisfied with rotating on the axis of ‘common sense’, so neither is an educational practice acceptable that sets at naught the ‘knowledge of living experience’ and simply starts out with the educators’ systematic cognition.”122 Paulo Freire’s ‘idea cards’ turned into seed cards of other ideas, other topics. Thanks to these efforts, once he began to write the text of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in July 1967, he could finish the first draft within two weeks. When that much was typed, he handed it over to his friend Ernani Maria Fiori for writing the preface of the book. The year before in 1966, Josue de Castro, the celebrated author of Geography of Hunger, visited Paulo Freire in Santiago. Talking about his own writing, Josue told Paulo: “I’ll suggest a good habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book or article, let, it ‘marinate’ for three months, four months in a drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always ‘change’ something”…123 Paulo Freire took this advice seriously and kept the book, along with the preface of Fiori, in a drawer to ‘marinate’. After a few months, he took the book out of the drawer as if he had met an old friend. He did not change much but he felt that one full chapter was missing. Thus he wrote the fourth and last chapter. The book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, thus was complete. Paulo Freire was indebted to countless North American women who wrote to him, from late 1970 to early 1971, after the book was published in 1970. They made him see ‘how much ideology resides in language’.124 Their observation led Paulo to replace ‘men’ by ‘women and men’ or human beings in his later works. 130

PAULO FREIRE

The rejection of the sexist ideology which necessarily involved the re-creation of language, according to Paulo Freire, is part of the possible dream of changing the world.125 “Changing language”, reflects Freire, “is part of the process of changing the world. The relationship, language-thought-world, is a dialectical, processual, contradictory relationship… the defeat of a sexist discourse, like the defeat of any authoritarian discourse, requires of us or imposes upon us the necessity, that, concomitantly with the new, democratic, anti-discriminatory discourse, we engage ourselves in democratic practices as well”, feels Paulo Freire.126 While speaking on language, Freire refers to his experience of close interaction with urban and rural workers – their metaphorical language full of symbolism. During his adolescence at Jaboatao and later on when he worked at SESI, his ears opened to the sonority of popular speech and thus he came to appreciate the essence of popular semantics and syntax. His long conversation with fishermen, his dialogue with peasants and urban labourers, not only familiarized him with this language but also sharpened his sensitivity to the lovely way they spoke of themselves - their sorrows and joys. Teaching, repeats Freire, is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive docile students. Starting out with the pupil’s knowledge does not mean circling around the knowledge ad infinitum. Starting out, for Paulo, means getting off down the road, getting going, shifting from one point to another, not sticking or staying. Paulo denies having ever said that we ought to flutter spellbound around the knowledge of the pupils like moths around a lamp bulb.127 XI

There were criticisms against the ‘pompousness’ of language and expression in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire defended his position thus: “I do not see the legitimacy of a student or teacher closing any book, not just Pedagogy of the Oppressed and simply declaring it to be ‘unreadable’ because he or she has not clearly understood the meaning of a sentence. And, especially, doing so without having expended any effort – without having behaved with the necessary seriousness of someone who does studies. There are many people for whom to pause in the reading of a text as soon as difficulties arise in an understanding of it, so that the reader should have to have recourse to the ordinary work tools – dictionaries, including those of philosophy, social sciences, etymology, or synonyms and encyclopedias – is a waste of time. No, on the contrary, the time devoted to consulting dictionaries or encyclopedias for an elucidation of what we are reading is study time, not wasted time. People will occasionally just “keep on reading” hoping that, magically, on the next page, the word in question might “come up again” in a context in which they will see what it means without having had to ‘look it up’.”128 Reading a text, Paulo Freire argues, is a more serious, more exacting, enterprise than this. Reading a text is not a careless, sluggish “stroll through the words”. Reading a text is learning the relationships among the words in the composition of the discourse. It is the task of a critical, humble, determined ‘subject’ or agent of learning, the reader.129 131

CHAPTER 2

Reading, as study, says Freire further, is a difficult, even painful process at times, but always a pleasant one as well. It implies that the reader delve deep into the text, in order to learn its most profound meaning. The more we do this exercise in a disciplined way, conquering any desire to flee the reading, the more we prepare ourselves for making future reading less difficult.130 Anyone taking a literacy course for adults, wants to learn to read and write sentences, phrases, words. However, the reading and writing of words comes by way of the reading of the world. Reading the world is an antecedent act vis-a-vis the reading of the word. The teaching of the reading and writing of the word to a person missing the critical exercise of reading and re-reading the world is, scientifically, politically and pedagogically crippled, says Freire.131 Contrary to the position of the neutralists, Paulo Freire affirms that such act of reading the word and the world would run the risk of influencing the pupils. “It is impossible to live, let alone exist, without risks,” observes Freire. Educational practice is directive. The more tolerant, the more open and forthright, the more critical, the more curious and humble they become, the more authentically they will take up the practice of teaching. Teaching is not a simple transmission of knowledge concerning the object or concerning content. Teaching from the post-modern perspective is not reducible merely to teaching students to learn through an operation in which the object of knowledge is the very act of learning. Teaching someone to learn is only valid when the pupils learn to learn in learning the reason-for, the ‘why’, of the object or the content, observed Freire. Teaching implies, on the other hand, that the pupils ‘penetrating’ the teacher’s discourse appropriate the deeper meaning of the content being taught. The act of teaching experienced by the professor is paralleled on the part of the pupils by their act of knowing that which is taught. In teaching, the teacher re-cognises the object already cognised. She or he remakes her or his cognizance in the cognizance of the pupils. Teaching is a creative act, a critical act and not a mechanical one. The curiosity of the teacher and students, in action, meet on the basis of teachinglearning.132 This is Paulo Freire’s view, in nutshell on teaching and learning. The act of studying, teaching, learning, knowing, though difficult and demanding, is pleasant too, observes Freire. Therefore teachers, who fail to take their teaching practice seriously, who do not study, disqualify themselves as teachers. Similarly, students, simultaneously with the teachers, must also engage themselves in the act of study in a disciplined manner. The progressive educators, feels Freire, should not underestimate or reject knowledge of the students. To underestimate the wisdom that necessarily results from socio-cultural experiences, would tantamount to a scientific error. Adds Freire, “how to avoid a dichotomy between the knowledges, the popular and the erudite, or how to understand and experience the dialectic between… ‘primary culture’ and ‘developed culture’. A respect for both knowledges can only lead to truths that go beyond both, observes Freire.133 “In our making and remaking of ourselves”, says Freire, “in the process of making history – as subjects and objects, persons becoming beings of insertion in the world and not of pure adaptation to the world – we should end by having the 132

PAULO FREIRE

dream, too, a mover of history. There is no change without dream, as there is no dream without hope”.134 “The understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism, ....would be unintelligible”, observes Freire, “without the dream, just as the deterministic conception feels uncomfortable, in its incompatibility with this understanding and therefore denies it”.135 Education, while not regarded as capable to accomplish all things, is to be acknowledged as important, feels Freire. In terms of classes, the working classes should not cease dreaming, should not close themselves off from the broadening of democratic spaces, observes Freire. The important thing is that the working classes continue to learn, in the very practice of their struggle, to set limits to their concessions – in other words, that they teach dominant classes the limits within which they themselves may move. The relationships between classes are a political fact, which generates a class knowledge, and that class knowledge has the most urgent need of lucidity and discernment when choosing the best tactics to be used. Those tactics vary in concrete history, but must be in consonance with strategic objectives. These tactics, observes Freire, are not learned in special courses but at the historical moment at which necessity imposes on social classes the necessary quest for a better relationship between them in dealing with their antagonistic interests.136 “If my position at the time had been mechanistic, I would not even have spoken of the raising of consciousness, of conscientizacao. I spoke of conscientizacao because, even with my slips in the direction of idealism, my tendency was to review and revise promptly, and thus adopting a consistency with the practice I had, to perceive that practice as steeped in the dialectical movement back and forth between consciousness and the world”, says Paulo Freire.137 This is a remarkable confession of the man, who, though aware of his limitation so far as his philosophical position is concerned, tries to get rid of ‘idealism’ in the concrete practical activity. There is no doubt that like Sartre, Freire also ‘idealises’ consciousness, as if it is a gift of the other world, an entity by itself capable of freely choosing irrespective of the surroundings, the objective reality. But Freire puts his feet firmly on the ground - in the world of practice of men and women. Let us listen to Freire again: “I would have rejected, like all mechanists, the need for conscientizacao and education before a radical change in the material conditions of society can occur”.138 And again: “…one can still speak of conscientizacao as an instrument for changing the world, provided this change be realized only in the interiority of awareness, with the world itself left untouched. Thus, conscientizacao would produce nothing but verbiage”.139 These arguments provided by Freire himself do corroborate the contention that Freire, aware of his ‘idealistic’ position, tries to get rid of those aspects that would render his whole exercise in people’s education fruitless and unworldly. Freire refers to an important discovery he made in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He writes, “Only in a dialectical understanding, let us repeat, of how awareness and the world are given, is it possible to comprehend the phenomenon of the introjection of the oppressor by the oppressed, the latter’s ‘adherence’ to the 133

CHAPTER 2

former, the difficulty that the oppressed have in localizing the oppressor outside themselves”.140 “Once again” says Freire, “the moment comes to mind when, twenty five years ago, I heard from Erich Fromm, in his house in Cuernavaca, his blue eyes flashing: ‘An educational practice like this is a kind of historico – sociolcultural and political psychoanalysis’”.141 Although the discovery was not completely new in Marxian sociology – the conscious effort of ‘extrojecting’ the same would be evident in the concept of a cultural revolution – Freire’s discovery comes from concrete Brazilian reality where the slave looked to the master as the one who should be emulated. The Freirean concept of conscientizacao is a critical examination of the cultural hang-over which enables men and women to come out of their colonial and semicolonial past. Says Freire, “…the critical effort through which men and women take themselves in hand and become agents of curiosity, become investigators, become subjects in an ongoing process of quest for the revelation of the ‘why’ of things and facts. Hence in the area of adult literacy, for example, I have long found myself insisting on what I call a ‘reading of the world and reading of the word’. Not a reading of the word alone, nor a reading only of the world, but both together, in dialectical solidarity.”142 Paulo Freire again observes, “There can be no doubt, for example, that our slavocratic past marks us as a whole still today. It cuts across the social classes, dominant and dominated alike. Both have worldviews and practices significantly indicative of that past, which thereby continues ever to be present. But our slavocratic past is not evinced exclusively in the almighty lord who orders and threatens and the humiliated slave who “obeys” in order to stay alive. It is also revealed in the relationship between the two. It is precisely by obeying in order to stay alive that the slave eventually discovers that “obeying”, in this case, is a form of struggle. After all, by adopting such behaviour, the slave survives. And it is from learning experience to learning experience that a culture of resistance is gradually founded, full of ‘wiles’, but full of dreams as well. Full of rebellion, amidst apparent accommodation”.143 Reflecting on educational practice, Freire says that as an object of curiosity, which curiosity is now operating epistemologically, the educational practice that, by ‘taking distance’ from it, is ‘closed in’ on, begins to reveal itself. Any educational practice always implies the existence of (1) a subject or agent, the person who instructs (2) the person who learns but who by learning also teaches and (3) the object to be imparted and taught – the object to be re-cognized and cognized – that is, content and (4) the methods by which the teacher approaches the content he or she is mediating to the taught. Indeed, the content – in its quality as a cognoscible object to be re-cognised by the educator while teaching it to the student, who in turn comprehends it only by apprehending it – cannot simply be transferred from the teacher to the taught, simply deposited in the student by the teacher. Educational practice, according to Freire, also involves processes, techniques, expectations, desires, frustrations and the on-going tension between practice and theory, between freedom and authority, where any exaggerated emphasis on 134

PAULO FREIRE

either is unacceptable from a democratic perspective which is incompatible with authoritarianism and permissiveness alike. Freire raises a fundamental problem which is of political nature regarding the content of the course. Who chooses it? On behalf of which persons and things the teaching would be performed? In favour of whom, in favour of what and against what? What is the role of the students in the programmatic organisation of content? What is the role of the cooks, maintenance workers, and security personnel in the school’s educational practice? What is the role of families, social organisations and local community? Answers to many of these questions would be found in nordic folk high schools. Teachers and students are not identical, observes Freire. It is a difference between them that makes them either teacher or student. If they were completely identical, each could be the other. Dialogue is meaningful precisely because the subjects of a dialogue, the agents in the dialogue, not only retain their identity, but actively defend it and they grow together. Precisely on this account, dialogue does not level them, does not even them out, reduce them to each other. Dialogue is not a favour done by one for the other, a kind of grace accorded. On the contrary, it implies a sincere fundamental respect on the part of the subjects engaged in it, a respect that is violated or prevented from materializing, by authoritarianism. Published in New York in September 1970, Pedagogy immediately began to be translated into various languages, sparking curiosity and favourable criticism in some cases, unfavourable in others. By 1974, the book had been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Swedish and its publication in London by Penguin Books carried Pedagogy to Africa, Asia and Oceania. The book, recalls Freire, appeared at an intensely troubled moment in history. Social movements appeared in Europe, the United States and Latin America. There were struggles against sexual, racial, cultural and class discrimination. The Greens were fighting in Europe to protect the environment. In Latin American countries military dictators began to speak a hitherto unheard of language of social equality as it took place in Peru, Panama and elsewhere. There were also guerrilla movements in many parts of Latin America - in Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Guateamala. Liberation movements were taking place in the continent of Africa, particularly in the Portuguese colonies. There took place political and pedagogical union movements in Europe in general and in Italy in particular. Che was the symbol of struggle all over the world. The Vietnam War was at its peak. Friere recalls that with each translation of Pedagogy, he would receive letters from that language-speaking readers from some part of the globe. There were letters from the United States, Canada, Latin America, and after publication by Penguin Books, from Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific islands, India, Englishspeaking countries of Africa. Alongwith the letters and sometimes separately, came invitations to discuss and debate the theoretical and practical points. Freire would meet students, teachers, workers etc. in Geneva to discuss various aspects he covered in the book. It was on the account of Pedagogy that Paulo Freire came to know the harsh reality of one of the most serious traumas of the “Third World in the First”: the 135

CHAPTER 2

reality of some of the so-called guest workers - Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Turks, Arabs etc. in Switzerland, France, Germany etc. – and their racial, class and sexual discrimination. In one of the seminars on literacy and post-literacy programmes for Portuguese workers in Germany during this period, Freire was told in vivid detail how they were despised by some of their German colleagues. Similar experiences with Spanish workers happened in Paris. “In my meetings with immigrant workers” says Freire, “Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese of whom a large proportion had also read Pedagogy, in Italian, Spanish or French, interest always centred on a more critical understanding of practice in order to improve future practice”,144 “While the University people generally speaking”, continues Freire, “tried to find and ‘understand a certain practice imbedded in a theory,’ the workers sought to sneak up on the theory that was imbedded in their practice. Regardless of the world I found myself in with labour leaders who were immersed in personal experience of politics and policy for changing the world, this is how it always was. It did not matter whether those leaders belonged to the Third World of the Third or to the Third World of the First. This is always the way it was”.145 While dwelling on the same theme (regarding the experience of some Spanish workers in Germany), Freire says, “First let me present a consideration along the lines of political ethics. Educators have the right, even the duty, to teach what seems to them to be fundamental to the space-time in which they find themselves. That right and that duty fall to the educator by virtue of the intrinsic ‘directivity’ of education. Of its very nature, education always ‘outstrips itself’. It always pursues objectives and goals, dreams and projects”.146 “The second reflection”, says Freire, “…is far more positive.... I fail to see how popular education, regardless of where and when it is practised, could prescind from the critical effort to involve, on the one side, educators and, on the other, educands, in a quest for the ‘why’ of the facts. In other words, in a popular education, focusing on cooperative production, union activity, community mobilization and organisation so that the community can take the education of its sons and daughters in hand through community schools – without this having to mean an excuse for the state to neglect one of its duties, that of offering the people education, along with care for their health, literacy and their education after the attainment of literacy – in any hypothesis, there is no discarding the gnosiological process. The process of knowing belongs to the very nature of education, and so-called popular education is no exception”. “On the other hand”, continues Freire, “popular education, in a progressive outlook, is not reducible to the purely technical training of which groups of workers have a real need. This will, of course, be the narrow training that the dominant class so eagerly offers workers – a training that merely reproduces the working class as such. Naturally, in a progressive perspective as well, a technical formation is also a priority. But alongside it is another priority, which must not be shoved out of the picture”,147. No doubt, Friere refers to the holistic aspect of all education, – the relationship with society in general. “My rebellion against every kind of discrimination, from the most explicit and crying to the most covert and hypocritical” says Freire, “….has been with me 136

PAULO FREIRE

from my childhood. Since as far back as I can remember, I have reacted almost instinctively against any word, deed or sign of racial discrimination, or for that matter, discrimination against the poor, which quite a bit later, I came to define as class discrimination”.148 Freire came across such discrimination not only in his native land, but also in the United States, where his first wife was once humiliated due to the colour of her skin. He also learnt of ghastly racial discrimination in many colonised countries of Africa including South Africa. His personal involvement in some of the newly emergent African counties, as they were being liberated from Portuguese colonial rule, made him aware of the vestiges of superstition even among the combatants and the depth of ignorance in which the Portuguese colonizers had shoved the whole population. XII

Pedagogy in Process As Freire settled in Geneva, he longed for further constructive work. Opportunities came when a Brazilian professor named Jose Maria Nunes Pereira wrote to Freire about his discussion with Mario Cabral, the Minister of Education, and Luis Cabral, the President of the newly independent state of Guinea Bissau. Thus, with time, Freire got involved with the literacy and post-literacy activities in Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tome and Principe (1975–77). Correspondence with Luis and Mario Cabral were published in a collection named Pedagogy in Process: The letters to Guinea Bissau. Freire wrote a detailed introduction where he dwelt on the various phases of his work there. In his foreword, Jonathan Kozol termed this booklet as “………….Unquestionably his most accessible……. also his most powerful and human.”149 At the very outset, Freire stressed that, “only as militants could we become true collaborators, even in a very small way – never as neutral specialists or as members of a foreign technical assistance mission.”150 “We….analysed carefully the relation”, wrote Freire, “between literacy education, post-literacy and production within the total plan of the society. We looked at the relation between literacy education and general education. We sought a critical comprehension of the role that literacy education for adults might play in a society like that of Guinea, where people’s lives had all been touched directly or indirectly by the war for liberation…… The political consciousness of the people had been born of the struggle itself. While 90 percent of the people were illiterate, in the literal sense of the term, they were politically highly literate – just the opposite of certain communities which possess a sophisticated kind of literacy but are grossly illiterate about political matters.”151 Recalling his earlier conviction, formed in Brazil, that educators need to reorient themselves, Freire wrote, “In transforming the educational system inherited from the colonizers one of the necessary tasks is the training of new groups of teachers and the retraining of old ones. Among these teachers… ….there will always be those who perceive themselves to be ‘captured’ by the old ideology and who will 137

CHAPTER 2

consciously continue to embrace it; they will fall into the practice of undermining either in a hidden or an open way, the new practice. From such persons one cannot hope for any positive action toward the reconstruction of the society. But there will be others who, also perceiving themselves to be captive to the old ideology, will nonetheless attempt to free themselves from it through the new practice to which they will adhere. It is possible to work with these persons. They are the ones who ‘commit class suicide’”152 One should recall the educational scenario in Guinea under the Portuguese. From 1471 till 1961, only 14 Guineans finished higher education courses and 11 the technical level.153 In ten years under the revolutionary system, more people graduated than in five centuries of Portuguese domination. In the academic year 1971–72, there were 164 schools in the liberated zone where 258 teachers taught 14,531 students. Freire’s task was to experiment with his literacy methods among the people who had just liberated themselves from the Portuguese colonial rule. On one hand it was necessary to give due importance to the armed struggle that was highly relevant during Freire’s involvement; on the other hand, the learners were engaged in the production process. Therefore, the schools were directly linked with people’s day to day life and struggle. Freire tried to combine these two necessities in his overall scheme of imparting literacy. Freire says, “It is imperative to reformulate the programs of geography, history and the Portuguese language, changing all the reading texts that were so heavily impregnated with the colonialist ideology. It was an absolute priority that Guinean students should study their own geography and not that of Portugal, the inlets of the sea and not the Rio Tejo. It was urgent that they study their history, the history of the resistance of their people to the invader and the struggle for their liberation……. It was necessary that the Guinean students be called to participate in the efforts toward national reconstruction……..it was also important to begin, perhaps timidly at first, to bring about the first steps toward a closeness between the middle-school students of Bissau and productive work.154 Paulo Freire and his team, constituted of activists and experts from the Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC) and World Council of Churches (WCC), tried to put into practice all these objectives. A glimpse of such efforts will be found in his article and interview entitled “The People Speak Their Word: Literacy and Action” and “Literacy in Guinea Bissau Revisited”, respectively, published in the collection Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Paulo Freire says, “………the materials developed for both the literacy and post literacy phases should be challenging and not patronizing”155. To show how this was done in São Tomé and in Principe, parts of the exercise work book and other texts were excerpted in this article. Freire continues, “The first stage of ‘Practice to learn’ is comprised of two codifications (photographs): the first, a photo of one of the beautiful coves of São Tomé, with a group of young people swimming; the second, a photo of a rural area, with a group of youths working. Next to the picture of the youths swimming is written: ‘It is by swimming that one learns to swim’. Next to the picture of the youths working is written: ‘It is by working that one 138

PAULO FREIRE

learns to work.’ And at the bottom of the page: ‘By practicing, we learn to practice better’.”156 Various texts like “Learning by Practice”, “Nature of Culture”, “Critical thinking” etc were incorporated in the workbook. The literacy phase primers provide ample materials to the adults to master literacy and develop knowledge about his/her own society and culture. The materials in the post-literacy stage are quite illuminating. Considering the fact that the previous phase gave the learners materials on various aspects of life and struggle, the text-materials in the post-literacy phase will enable the learners to dwell on more abstract subjects. Passages on ‘The Act of Studying’, ‘National Reconstruction’, ‘Work and Transformation of the World’ ‘The struggle for Liberation’, ‘The New Society’, ‘Manual and Intellectual Work’ take the learner to the level of responsible discussants on issues concerning the society and the world. They, thus, can act as matured thinking subjects. It is quite apparent that here, what Freire achieved in Brazil and Chile in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, was further improved through his own intellectual development and participation of his colleagues. It is our considered opinion that all primer- writers in the field of adult literacy should go through the primers developed by Friere and his colleagues in Africa before venturing into this area. In the interview referred to above, Donaldo Macedo asked Freire if he had adequately discussed and evaluated the reality of the Guinea Bissau society before executing his plan. Freire replied in the affirmative. However, he mentioned that there were unresolved linguistic issues since many in Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and Principe did not speak Portuguese. They spoke their own language. However, those spoken languages had not developed any written form. Creole, a mixture of Portuguese and an indigenous language or languages, was prevalent in some areas. Freire remarked that Creole could be used in those areas after transforming it in the written form, developing its grammar, syntax etc. It was quite apparent from the interview that the reality in Africa was much more complex than what Freire envisaged. No cut-out model could be transplanted and it needed years of research before embarking upon such a venture. The Freirean philosophy stresses that though an illiterate adult lacks the knowledge of the alphabets, he/she is otherwise highly knowledgeable in worldly matters and therefore his / her learning of alphabets should be very different from the process of alphabetization of the child. The validity of this theory has been eloquently explained in the primers developed by Freire in Africa. Freire visited some of the most interesting theatres of social revolution in the 1970s. In Africa, he visited Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. He developed a deep personal relationship with the revolutionary leaders of Guinea Bissau. In Pedagogy of Hope he quoted from a speech by Amilcar Cabral. – “Let no one imagine that the officers of the revolutionary forces approve the notion that, if we carry a talisman in our belt, we shall not die in battle. No, we shall not die in battle if we do not wage war or attack the enemy from a position of weakness. If we make mistakes, if we are in a position of weakness, we shall certainly die. There is no way around that. You can tell me a string of stories that you have in 139

CHAPTER 2

your heads: ‘Cabral does’nt know. We have seen cases where it was the talisman that snatched our comrades from the jaws of death. The bullets were headed right for them, and they turned around and recocheted back the other way’. You can say that. But I have hope that our children’s children, when they hear that, will be glad that PAIGEC (African Party for Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) was able to wage the struggle in accordance with the reality of their land – and not have to say, “Our grandparents fought really hard, but they believed in superstitions”. This conversation may mean nothing to you now. I’m talking about the future. But I have certitude that the majority understand what I say, and know I am right”.157 Paulo Freire was fully aware of the phenomenon of racial discrimination – both in his native land and elsewhere in the world. He himself once experienced a mild form of racism in Chicago. Freire wanted to confront this problem from an angle which would not accentuate the existing divide. Freire says, “Cultural pluralism is another serious problem that ought to be subjected to this kind of analysis. Cultural pluralism does not consist of a simple juxtaposition of cultures, and still less is it the prepotent might of one culture over another. Cultural pluralism consists in the realization of freedom, in the guaranteed right of each culture to move in mutual respect, each one freely running the risk of being different, fearless of being different, each culture being ‘for itself ’. They need the opportunity to grow together but preferably not in the experience of an ongoing tension provoked by the almightiness of one culture vis-a-vis all the others, which latter would all be ‘forbidden to be’”.158 Freire observes that tension is needed to emphasize the existence of various cultures co-habiting in a democratic relationship with one another. The tension of which the cultures are in need of in a multicultural society, says Freire, is the tension of not being able to escape their self-construction, their self-creation, their self-production, with their very step in the direction of a cultural pluralism, which will never be finished and complete. The society to whose space other ethnic groups have come to be “absorbed” in a subordinate relationship, has its dominant class, its class structure, its language, its syntax, its class semantics,, its tastes, its dreams, etc. On the other hand, Freire observes, the society to whose space other ethnic groups have arrived, have their own dreams and desires. Therefore, only genuine multiculturalism is able to provide space for both. But this multiculturalism does not grow spontaneously; it must be created, politically produced, worked upon, in the sweat of one’s brow, in concrete history. Freire, therefore, like many seers before him, prescribe unity in diversity. The very quest for this oneness is difference; the struggle for it is a process. Since multiculturalism is not achieved spontaneously, it must be created, through certain educational practices. It calls for a new ethics, founded on respect for differences. In the early stages, this struggle means mobilizing and organising all the various cultural forces and bringing them to bear on a broadening, deepening of the democratic process. XIII

While in Geneva, working for the World Council of Churches, Freire obtained an entry visa for Haiti. However, on arrival in Kingston airport, he was informed that 140

PAULO FREIRE

he was prohibited from entering the country. The seminar which was earlier arranged in Haiti was shifted to the Dominican Republic. Heading toward the Domincan Republic, Freire was made to stop at Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. He was then smuggled out of the airport by a friend of his companion working for the United Nations. Writes Freire, “The little city struck me. Especially, all the popular artists, who displayed their paintings in various corners of the squares. Their pictures were full of colour, and spoke of the life of their people, the pain of their people, the joy of their people. It was the first time that, in the face of such loveliness, such artistic creativity, such a quantity of colours, I felt as if I were, as indeed I was, faced with a multiplicity of discourses on the part of the people. It was as if the Haitian popular classes, forbidden to be, forbidden to read, to write, spoke or made their discourse of protest, of denunciation and proclamation, through art, the sole manner of discourse they were permitted. By painting, they not only supported themselves and their families, but also supported, maintained, within themselves, possibly without knowing it, the desire to be free”.159 Freire describes his unique experience of visiting Dominica, a small Caribbean island where simple peasants were involved in an interesting experiment of managing a cooperative firm. Writes Freire “peasants living on a large, financially troubled ranch, which had been a key contributor to the country’s agricultural production, had persuaded the government to buy the ranch (with the cooperation of the British company that ran it) and hand it over to them, whereupon they undertook to purchase it over the course of so-and-so many years”.160 The peasants then created a cooperative, with the technological assistance of an agricultural engineer who had been working with them. When Paulo visited the cooperative, they had already been managing the property for a little over a year and were having excellent results. “It was raining when I got out of the car to climb the slippery, muddy slope – its clay a ‘cousin’ to the massape of Brazil’s Northeast. With a slip here and a slide there, my right hand tight on the arm of the president of the cooperative, my feet groping for a foothold, finally we got to the house, which was lighted by a kerosene lamp”.161 They spoke a bit – Freire and the president. The latter’s wife, in a corner of the room, was listening but not venturing to say anything. Freire was tired and was thinking of going to bed. “Before going to my room”, says Freire, “their own room, which they had put at my disposition in a gesture of siblingship – naturally, I wanted to use the bathroom. Then it was that I perceived how far removed I was from the concrete daily life of peasants, despite my having written the book they had read in their study circles and therefore, invited me to come and talk with them. “The more I needed to go to the bathroom, the less casual 1 felt about asking where it was. This could be complicated. I said to myself, if I ask where the bathroom is, and there is no bathroom, how will I be understood? “Suddenly I said to myself: am I not being a bit like the white liberals who feel guilty when they talk with blacks? …I summoned my courage, then and asked my friend: ‘where is the bathroom?’ ‘The bathroom?’ ‘The bathroom is the world’, 141

CHAPTER 2

said Mr. President, courteously conducting me beneath the mango tree, where we both raised the level of the water flowing down through the grass”.162 Later Freire discovered that after a little over a year of being their own bosses, under a democratic regime – without, therefore, the abuses of unlimited freedom and permissiveness or of unlimited authority – the work on the ranch was genuinely exemplary. The peasants had set up some ten centres throughout the area – ten nuclei – each managed by a team and headed by an elected officer. The work of the cooperative was conducted in a truly cooperative manner. They discussed their own achievements and difficulties and sorted things out through conversation and dialogue. The ranch was not only a production centre, but a cultural centre too. Towards the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, Freire was twice more in the Caribbean. On these occasions his destination was Grenada, the magnificent little island that almost magically had mounted a revolution that, all fine and gentle that it was, nevertheless failed to escape the fury of the Big Brother who owned the world. Three meetings on the first visit left an indelible impression on Freire. One consisted of an entire day of conversations with the minister of education and his teams, in which they discussed certain basic aspects of the new education they were gradually putting into practice. They reflected on an education which, while respecting children’s understanding of the world would challenge them to think critically. It would be an education in whose practice the teaching of content would never be dichotomised from the teaching of precise thinking. They spoke of an antidogmatic, anti-superficial thinking – a critical thinking, which would constantly resist the temptation of pure improvisation. The effort in the direction of implementing the above considerations called for retraining of the educators. It needed a serious, consistent effort to overcome the old authoritarian, elitist framework which though latent lingered among the teachers. In his conversation with the educators Freire told them of the premise on which such transformation would be based. He told them that it would be possible to develop any number of dimensions, with innovations in curricular organisation, on the basis of a new relationship between teachers and students, with new human relations in the schools, new relations between the school and families, new relations with the neighbourhood the school is in. The second meeting was with the administrators of the ministry of education. The ministry set aside a morning for dialogue in which all were invited, including clerks, chauffeurs, secretaries of the various departments and typists. Reactions ranged from stunned surprises on some faces to a great curiosity and an ebullient eagerness to learn more in the expressions worn by the majority. One of the conclusions of the participants was that such meetings should be held on a systematic basis, although attendance would be optional. The third meeting Freire held was with the leader of the revolution, Mr. Bishop himself. The president received Freire and his colleague Arturo Ornelles in his residence. The meeting lasted for three hours. Their conversation was over fruit juice and a luscious tray of exquisite native fruits. “At the moment I write, and comb my memory”, says Freire, “I wonder about two or three qualities of that 142

PAULO FREIRE

person, so soon to be erased from the world that loved him, which touched Arturo and me in our conversation with him”.163 Freire mentions two outstanding qualities of Bishop – simplicity and lack of artificiality. It was the simplicity of a person who lived a life of consistency between what he said and what he did. He did not even need to make an effort to keep from falling into self-adulation. It was thus that, with simplicity, at times with the smile of a child, he spoke of the adventurous exploit (but not that of an adventurer) that he had undertaken, he and his companions, in search of the assumption of the power that he then sought to re-create. He had a taste for freedom, mentions Freire, and a respect for freedom of others. He was determined to help his people help themselves, mobilize, organise, retrace the outlines of their society. He had a clear sense of historical opportunity. Paulo Freire recalls his dialectical way of thinking. Paulo feels that Bishop thought dialectically so spontaneously and habitually that there was no separation in him between discourse and practice. Freire, during this conversation, found in Bishop a kind of simplicity and love for democracy which were very similar characteristics of the African leader Amilcar Cabral. Bishop even suggested that Freire should discuss the notion of civil spirit with which and with which alone, Bishop stressed, the society could be remade. One Sunday morning in Geneva, in 1971. Paulo Freire was visited by a young Portuguese. Freire writes, “At one point in our conversation, that Sunday morning of which I report here, the young Portuguese gentleman referred directly to the work at Coimbra. ‘Does Paulo Freire know how a group of Catholic women have perverted his ideas in the countryside around Coimbra?’ “‘What I know of the work done in Coimbra doesn’t seem to me to be a distortion of my proposals. By all indications, it was simply what could concretely be done’, I said and I went on: ‘Under what regime, under what police observation do you think those young women were working in Coimbra?’ “But without answering my question the young man insisted that ‘they had not associated the literacy campaign with the political struggle against Salazar. They were just nice little catholic girls. They had no understanding of the class struggle as the thrust of history’, he concluded, triumphantly”.164 Three years had passed since the conscientizacao of the Portuguese colonial armed forces. The Carnation Revolution had erupted. A new government was in place and had initiated the process of democratizing Portugal and decolonizing Africa, once misnamed Portuguese. “Hopes reigned. Spirits forbidden so much as speak, shouted and sang. Minds prohibited from thinking discoursed, and burst the bonds that had held them”, writes Paulo poetically.165 Later Paulo Freire visited Portugal at the invitation of the new Government. He spoke to teachers and students. He visited Coimbra and its university. Led by the loving, dedicated young women who had believed in God and the need to change the world on behalf of the outcasts, Paulo Freire visited the peasants who in 1969 had sent him beautiful cards that spoke of their brotherly and sisterly love. 143

CHAPTER 2

No discourse, says Freire, on the class struggle had been necessary during the literacy course, however real that struggle might have been, in order for these women to perceive, once the right moment arrived, the relationship between the reading of the word and the world and above all the transformation of the world. Paulo Freire came to know of the Carnation Revolution when he was on a thirtyfive day visit to Australia, New Zealand and some of the principal islands of the region. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was the principal theme of discussion. Its publication by Penguin Books enabled it to reach all of that world, along with India and the former British colonies of Africa. In Australia, Paulo Freire had the opportunity of contacts with Marxist intellectuals who had grasped the dialectical relationship between the world and consciousness and had assimilated, feels Freire, the theses defended in Pedagogy of the Oppressed rather than looking upon it as a volume on ‘idealism’. He discussed with factory workers, with “aborigines”. He debated with university professors and students and with protestant and catholic religious groups. He discussed animatedly the ‘theology of liberation’, both its importance and pitfalls. In New Zealand, he held similar discussions. He held discussions with indigenous leaders. He was impressed by their insight, their awareness of their position of subjection and their rejection of that position, their thirst for struggle and their nonconformity. XIV

Fiji was the last destination of Paulo Freire’s sojourn in the Far East. Paulo Freire was struck by the intimate tone of the students of South Pacific University. The huge auditorium was packed with listeners; separate arrangements had to be made for the crowd who gathered in the adjoining lawn. He had similar experience in Bahia twenty years later. Paulo Freire’s trip to Chile in June 1973, as he recalls in Pedagogy of Hope was also an unforgettable experience. Dwelling on the Chilean experience, he says, “I shall concentrate on two moments that I experienced then, in the extraordinary climate of the struggle of the political ideologies, in the class confrontation that reached such levels of finesse on the part of the dominant classes and was such a powerful learning process for the popular classes. It was apropos of this era that I heard from a worker that he had learned more in one week than in all his life up until them”.166 In August 1973, Paulo Freire received an invitation from the Argentine minister of education. On his way to Argentina he stayed overnight with the famous Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro who was then staying in exile in Lima. Darcy talked about his work in Peru, his plans for books, his reflection in the area of culture and education. They reminisced about the days when Darcy was President Goulart’s Chief of staff and Paulo was the Chief of the National Programme of Adult Literacy. They spoke of Chile, of Allende and his democratic values. In Buenos Aires, Paulo Freire met the rectors of the public universities, discussed with the ministry’s various teams, visited slums on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and, finally, met political activists. 144

PAULO FREIRE

He was surprised at the innovative élan with which the universities were working. Teaching and research went had in hand. Most of the universities had taken up extension work. The universities were collaborating with social movements and popular groups. Paulo Freire concluded his memoirs with a report on his and his wife’s visit to El Salvador in July 1992. Freire says, “In El Salvador, the peasant men and women who had been struggling, all through these years – with weapons in their hands and at the same time, with curious eyes for sentences and words, as they read and reread the world, as they fought to make that world less ugly and less unjust by learning to read and write words had invited Paulo to celebrate with them, in hope, an interval of peace in the war”.167 The University of El Salvador bestowed on Paulo Freire a doctorate ‘honoris causa’. They discussed about Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo felt that the book was as relevant in 1992 as it was in 1970. It was the heart and soul of their literacy campaign. XV

Paulo Freire in Brazil Again Paulo Freire returned to Brazil in 1979. He took over as Secretary of Education for the city of Sao Paulo in 1989. He served in this post for a period of two and a half years. During this period he tried to combine his utopian ideas with reality and achieved phenomenal success. We shall give an account of what was actually achieved, what was the dream and how this work could be judged by posterity. In the words of Ana Maria Saul, a professor of Pontifica Catholic University of Sao Paulo and Freire’s collaborator in this project, “Paulo Freire was able to put together a cohesive educational team around the political proposal of the Department of Education”.168 Even after his departure, the team continued with the work which is “a rare fact in the Brazilian culture where the presence of administrators is so personalized and centralized that their absence for whatever reasons, always causes serious ruptures in the proposals…”169 The second significant aspect was that “Paulo Freire followed in his fight, as he had always done, the yearning for a democratic education by writing, giving lectures throughout Brazil and the world, and, at the same time, keeping abreast of the work being done by the city government and the city’s Department of Education.”170 In 1989, when Paulo Freire took office the effects of the neglect of the educational system by previous administrations were very visible. The school buildings deteriorated; there were prevalence of a cultural morass, skepticism and fear among the educators. Teacher training colleges were devalued. Freire attempted to invert the process and placed his emphasis on the poor. Four priorities were earmarked: 1. Democratization and access. 2. Democratization of administration 3. New quality of teaching. 4. Youth and adult education. 145

CHAPTER 2

Regarding the point number 1, Ana Maria Saul reports that in the city of São Paulo inhabited by ten million people, with an increase of 300,000 each year, 30 per cent school age children were proposed to be enrolled in Basic education. The actual number was 771,730 students attending 688 schools in the public school system. This number represented 42.10 per cent of the school-age children who were enrolled in schools with the following breakdown: 493,850 students in basic education in 353 schools. 1,032 students in five schools for deaf students. 2,028 in a single professional school (high school level) where a teacher preparation course was also offered. 194,976 children between 4 and 6 years of age, in 329 schools (kindergarten and preschool). Compared to the 1988 statistics, there was an increase of 15.59 percent with an absolute increase of 120,358 students. This increase, the same source suggests, was due to expansion in the number of schools. Seventy seven (77) new schools (11.19 per cent) were constructed. Efforts were made to maximize the use of existing school buildings by operating four different shifts of four-hour duration each.171 Night schools occupying the same buildings served 80,000 students receiving regular courses as well as special courses. Ana Maria reports, “We, however, consider that the increase in the construction of new schools still falls far short of our goals. This affirmation must be evaluated in two different contexts: On the one hand, there was the option to renovate 60 percent of the school buildings in the system, including general maintenance, remodeling and changes (really new construction) of buildings that had practically deteriorated. In terms of school furniture we initially bought 60,000 new desks for students. In addition, we purchased new sets of school equipment that represented the greatest acquisition and distribution of these articles to schools in the system in fifty two years. These included: televisions, video cassettes, sound machines, slide projectors, tape recorders, 825 microcomputers. We began regularly to provide the more commonly used materials to 40 per cent of students, particularly in preschools, in order to provide relief to families who could ill afford to buy materials such as scissors, chalk, notebooks, pencils etc. We deliberately invested in the purchase of seventy eight thousand children’s literature and other pedagogical books that filled the gap in reading rooms that were, for the most part, empty. The expansion of these materials represented an increase of 500 percent in relation to the period of 1986 to 1988.”172 “In his role as administrator,” says Ana Maria Saul, “Paulo Freire always reminded us of the connection between the day to day routine of Brazilian schools and the society within which these schools are situated. He often called our attention to the fact that the ‘oppressed brings within him or her the oppressor’ wishing to underline the necessary effort in the struggle for liberation so as to achieve a more just and democratic society.”173 Ana Maria reports that during the period of Paulo Freire’s administration and thereafter, it has been possible to have deliberative school councils because Freire, 146

PAULO FREIRE

on his first day as Secretary of Education, reestablished, with the Mayor’s support, a school’s common constitution within a perspective that respects educational professionals belonging to the city-wide school system. During the four years of PT administration, there were four school council elections. These elections, say Ana, were not without difficulties. There were conservative principals who tried to manipulate the elections. There were instances in which the school councils made decisions that the administration and school personnel thought wrong.174 The work with the school councils was not always well understood even by the school community that felt school issues traditionally concerned only teachers and specialists.175 During the two and half years of Freire’s administration, there were tensions of power between the principal and school specialists’ authority and the democratization and sharing of power with teachers, students, and parents.176 Freire’s administrators discussed with schools and unions the by-laws of a schools, constitution and the necessary changes to the constitution in the beginning of Freire’s administration. It would have been absolutely anti-democratic to have presented to the city council and the school councils a ready-made set of proposed by-laws without the input of parents, teachers, students, and community members. In this connection, Ana Maria Saul says that they could not and should not have run the risk of committing the “sin of power” obtained through elections only to use this power arbitrarily.177 The Bureau of Education backed off from various aspects of the Constitution, not without a fight, but always respecting the rules of the democratic game. The proponents of reform lost, for example, the opportunity to have elections of school principals. But they won the right to have deliberative school councils with more power than before with equal representation of teachers, parents, staff, educational specialists and community members. A school council is responsible for the elaboration and evaluation of the school plan. The school councils had representatives from the ten regions that divided the city of Sao Paulo and they organized themselves in regional chapters of school councils. These regional councils were involved not only in school related issues but also were part of the city budget planning.178 One of the most significant developments was the following: Parent participation and on-going training meetings with school guards and cafeteria workers represented part of Freire’s dream that was realized.179 The work with the community was crystallized with a project called “in favour of life, not violence”. The work carried out with the community yielded some positive results. It created public spheres where the community could discuss and debate problems in an effort to solve them. Some of the steps that were taken included the utilization by the community of school equipment during weekends, principally when the community began to valorize schools by understanding what schools did and could do, especially when the community was to participate in schools.180 The new quality of education progressed as announced by Paulo Freire with the following objectives: reorientation of curricula and teacher education. Reorientation of the curricula was a movement that opposed so-called educational packets generally imposed on schools. It was characterized by the development of a process curriculum within a perspective of liberating education. 147

CHAPTER 2

The on-going teacher education that was proposed by the Freire administration, represented the foundation supporting the process of reorientation of the curriculum. It required great creativity in its elaboration and execution, given the great number of teachers involved (35, 131).181 The two initial stages of the movement, problematization and systematization were implemented systemwide in all degrees and patterns of teaching. Another objective in the reorientation of curriculum movement was the art of the teaching via an interdisciplinary focus – a focus that takes generative things as a point of departure.182 The multidisciplinary teams from the Education Action Nucleus of the Department of Technical Orientation and the pilot schools with mentoring from university professors worked keenly in the collective development of the proposal of interdisciplinary focus, elaborating its description, establishing its foundation, its basic procedures and results.183 The program of teacher education had the following basic goals: – The conceptualization of the desired school that has as its major goal the development of a new pedagogy. – The need to supply elements of basic education to teachers, in different areas of human knowledge. – The appropriation by educators of new scientific/technological advances of human knowledge that can contribute toward the enhancement of the quality of the desired school.184 As a result of these measures there was a marked improvement in the program and a lower level of student failure –especially in the first and fifth grades. In Sao Paulo, it was reduced to 22 per cent instead of the previous 50 per cent.185 In a review of the book entitled, Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in Sao Paulo written by Maria del Pilar O’Cadiz, Pia Lindquist Wong and Carlos Alberto Torres, the reviewer, David N. Plank said: “In 1989, Paulo Freire, then 68 years old and internationally renowned for his theoretical and practical work on the education of children and adults, accepted an appointment in the position of secretary in the municipal education system in the city of Sao Paulo. The Workers’ Party (Partido Trabalhista or PT) had won the recent municipal elections, and Sao Paulo – as Brazil’s largest and richest city – offered an exceptional platform on which to construct and display an alternative to the country’s notoriously ineffective basic education systems. Moreover, the challenges facing the municipal school system provided an opportunity for Freire to put some of his ideas about education and educational reform in practice.”186 There were enormous challenges that Freire faced (Brazil is a federal republic, in which power is shared among federal, state and local authorities). The city of Sao Paulo is a single municipio in a vast metropolitan system comprising dozens of local governments, and the metropolitan area lies at the heart of Brazil’s largest, richest and politically most important state. During the PT’s years of power, both federal and state governments were under the control of other parties, far more conservative than the PT and hostile to its political and social goals.187 148

PAULO FREIRE

Freire’s program for educational reform in Sao Paulo, says Plank, was complex and ambitious, but its essential elements included a decentralization of authority to the school level, an affirmation of the professional capability and autonomy of teachers, and an expansion of the school community program to encompass parents and students as well as educators. The program also included encouragement to teachers to develop interdisciplinary curricula organized around “generative themes” and to adopt new strategies for instruction and assessment focused on group work, classroom participation, and the demonstration of understanding rather than performance on examinations.188 Reviewing the book, Plank says that some of the reforms sought by the PT were readily accepted, and parents, teachers, and students committed themselves wholeheartedly to make them work. Others (e.g., the direct election of school principals) were vehemently opposed by educators,189 while parents in Sao Paulo (like parents everywhere) expressed reservations about the implementation of a “constructivist” curriculum that paid less than full attention to the inculcation of basic skills.190 Plank says further, “Among the obstacles that the reformers were obliged to overcome were resistance by students to accepting greater responsibility in the class room, resistance by teachers and parents to additional commitment of time to the work of the schools, divisions among the professional staff and skepticism among a significant minority about the merit of PT’s reforms, lack of time to fully implement and evaluate pilot projects before “scaling up” to include more schools, policy overload as several discrete reforms were implemented simultaneously, insufficient administrative support and oversight for implementation at the school site and so on.”191 The most ambitious component of Freire’s reform project, says Plank, coincided with the PT’s broader aspiration to inaugurate a “social mobilization” through the schools, in which the school would serve as a centre for social and political activism in the community in which it was located. This was expected to occur on a number of different levels, ranging from the development of curricula explicitly oriented to the identification and amelioration of community problems to the modeling of democratic practice in the organization and administration of the school. In their efforts to enact their larger ambitions for social mobilization, popular participation, and democratic control, Freire and the PT suffered a number of significant defeats, culminating in their removal from office by the voters of Sao Paulo at the end of their first term in office.192 Plank says that on the basis of the evidence presented by the authors it seems clear that what parents and teachers wanted in Sao Paulo was better education for the children under their care, and they worked hard in cooperation with the PT administration to achieve it. They were manifestly less interested in “political mobilization” or social transformation, and the PT’s efforts to achieve these goals through the schools ended in frustration. Freire vehemently objected to such formulations and said that the municipal education system was politically backward. The authors also pointed out the teachers’ inability or unwillingness to fully understand the conceptual framework of the project.193 Though Sao Paulo had witnessed partial failure, yet “from another point of view, the reform project may be regarded as Freire’s greatest triumph: the adoption 149

CHAPTER 2

and implementation of his ideas and reform proposals by educators throughout Brazil, including many who do not share his political views…………. In the 1990s the reforms that Freire initiated in Sao Paulo – expanded participation in school governance by parents and community members, decentralization and school – level autonomy, affirmation of the professional capacity of teachers – have been widely adopted and imitated in cities and states throughout Brazil …”.194 Michael W. Apple, in a review of the same book observed, “In 1990, I went to Sao Paulo to lecture and to work with a number of the individuals whom Freire had brought with him when he became secretary of education for the city of Sao Paulo. It was clear to me that a very complex and contradictory situation existed there. What Freire and his colleagues were attempting was basically to apply the perspectives and approaches that had come out of his work on literacy and critical and popular education to the primary and secondary schools of an entire city. First through a number of demonstration schools and later through a much wider network of schools – most of which were in poor and workingclass area – a thoroughgoing reconstruction was attempted. This included the development of an integrated curriculum from the bottom up based on generative themes taken from local schools and communities, the improvement of the conditions of teachers, a close working relationship between schools and local communities, and a much more collaborative relationship between educators in the government and educators in the local schools. All of this was under the leadership of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Workers Party.”195 SECTION – II

Over the last three decades and more, many writers have attempted to analyse the life and work of Paulo Freire. It is not possible to study all of them here in this book. We shall, however, try to consider the contents of a few who have sought to present Paulo Freire’s life in the context of his work. While going through the works of these authors, we shall discover areas of Freire’s life which he himself had not explicitly illuminated. We shall also find out, in some cases, how he has been misrepresented and misunderstood. I

In the Introduction to the book, Literacy and Revolution: the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Robert Mackie wrote, “Freire was born in 1921 in the town of Recife, situated on the Atlantic seaboard coast at the most eastern point of the South American continent. His family was middle class and although his mother was a devout Catholic, his father was not. The religious differences between the parents apparently did not produce any conflict or tension in the household since each parent respected the other’s position.”196 Mackie continues, “Freire’s early childhood corresponded with the years of worldwide economic depression and his family, like so many others, experienced hunger and poverty. Even though malnutrition caused him to fall behind at school, Freire remembers how the outward symbols of social class separated him from 150

PAULO FREIRE

other children. The fact that his father continued to wear a tie, and that his home contained a German piano, signified to others distinctions of class that could not be erased. As Freire says ‘we shared the hunger but not the class’. By the time his brothers were old enough to work, the family’s position had improved. Freire was able to complete high school successfully and proceeded to Recife University where he studied to be a teacher of Portuguese”197 One will observe that Mackie did not mention the experience of extreme poverty of Freire in his adolescence which led him to re-examine the condition of the poor as opportunities arose, nor does he mention that Paulo studied Law. “In 1944, Freire met his wife Elza”, says Mackie, “who was also a teacher. Together they shared a career in teaching and began to work as well in the ‘Catholic Action’ movement, among other middle class families in Recife. Freire recalls that this involved trying to explain the contradiction between the demands of Christian faith and petit bourgeois lifestyle. It proved to be an extremely disheartening experience, as they uncovered strong resistance to the idea that bourgeois families should, for example, treat their servants as human beings”. ‘After this’, Freire comments, ‘we started to make our choices. We decided not to keep working with the bourgeois, and instead to work with the people’.”198 Freire, in his autobiographical work did not mention this experience of working in the Catholic Action movement. Denis E. Collins mentions in his account (we shall study him after we have finished with Mackie) that Freire lost his faith in Christianity due to such negative experiences. But we do not find this in Mackie’s account. The specific reason of his disillusionment which is elaborated here is also not available in many other works. Mackie mentions, the encounter with the worker at a seminar after Freire made a speech citing Piaget. He correctly mentions Freire’s inability to understand the workers properly at that time which he himself confessed in Pedagogy of Hope. Then Mackie mentions something extremely significant: “It was only from a continual and prolonged process of both research and living with the poor in the slums of Recife that he finally understood the syntax of the people. ‘I was not a myth in those days’, he says, ‘and I had more time’.” Freire’s endeavours in this area provided the framework for his doctoral thesis on the teaching of adult illiterates which was submitted to Recife University in 1959. Not long after, the University offered him a chair in the history and philosophy of education.199 Mackie does not mention where Freire was working at that time. Mackie writes, “In 1962 Miguel Arraes, mayor of Recife, sponsored a programme to promote adult literacy in the municipality and appointed Paulo Freire as its coordinator. “It was in this context that the famous ‘culture circles’ were launched. So pronounced was Freire’s success in Recife that in the following year the Government of President Joao Goulart invited him to become Director of National Literacy Programme. Thus Freire’s influence extended out from Recife to encompass the entire country. In his new post, Freire hoped to parallel the dramatic results of Fidel Castro’s campaign during 1960–64 to eliminate illiteracy in Cuba. With the support of Education ministers Paulo de Tarso and Julio Sambaquy, Freire drew up plans to import 35,000 Polish slide projectors and establish 20,000 ‘culture circles’ 151

CHAPTER 2

throughout Brazil. Eight-month training courses were begun for coordinators in nearly every state. It was anticipated that by 1964, two million people would be undergoing Freirean literacy programmes.”200 Mackie further writes, “Not all sections of Brazilian society, however, viewed these developments with enthusiasm. The conservative Rio de Janeiro paper O Globo charged that the Freire method was stirring up the people, giving them ideas about changing things, and hence fomenting subversion. Responding to accusations that he was intending to ‘Bolshevise the country’, Freire notes that his actual crime was to treat literacy as more than a mechanical problem. By linking literacy to critical consciousness it became an effort to liberate the people, and not simply an instrument to domesticate them. Although the political climate was favourable, the Freirean programme was given little time to demonstrate its full effectiveness. As events turned out, Freire had less than eighteen months”201 Mackie mentions that “Under Brazil’s constitution illiterates were forbidden to vote, so the extension of literacy carried in its wake a growing democratization of the country. In the eyes of the military and other powerful sections of Brazilian society, this constituted a threat to the political monopoly enjoyed by the few.202 We find some interesting details regarding Freire’s work in Chile.Mackie writes, “In Chile the government of President Eduardo Frei regarded the problem of adult literacy as serious enough to warrant the creation, in mid-1965, of a Department of Special Planning for the Education of Adults. Its director was Waldemar Cortes, principal of a night school in Santiago.Cortes made contact with Freire, who had been given a position at the University of Chile and decided to implement his literacy method. This raised the immediate problem of gaining acceptance in Chile for a method considered subversive in Brazil. A number of people in the governing Christian Democratic Party considered Freire to be radical, even Communist. With persuasion and effort, however, Cortes managed to get the programme accepted. In this way Freire became involved in Chilean Agrarian Reform Corporation, particularly its training and research institute, which put the adult literacy programme into practice on behalf of the Cortes’ department.”203 “Freire’s period in Chile was especially fruitful in other ways as well”, says Mackie. “During this time he wrote up his Brazilian experience in the monograph Education: the Practice of Freedom, which was published in Rio in 1967, with an introduction contributed by his colleague Francisco Weffort. Two years later, Freire’s examination of the problems of agrarian reform, Extension or Communication, was published in Santiago, accompanied by a preface from the leading Chilean economist Jacques Chonchol. It was, however, another five years before these works appeared in English under the title Education for Critical Consciousness. Preceding this, so far as English readers were concerned, was the translation of Freire’s most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This was completed in 1968 and appeared as Freire’s first work in English two years later”.204 Mackie continues, “In 1969 he accepted an invitation to be a visiting professor for the following year at Harvard University’s Centre for Studies in Education and Development. Thus Freire left Chile before Salvador Allende’s Marxist government was elected to power in 1970, and he returned only briefly during Allende’s period 152

PAULO FREIRE

of office. Nonetheless, it is significant to note that when Allende was violently overthrown in 1973, the regime of General Pinochet lost little time in declaring Freire persona non grata”.205 “Freire’s year at Harvard,” says Mackie further, “was a notable personal success as his ideas formed a large and sympathetic audience in North America. During 1970 he wrote a series of articles for the Harvard Educational Review on adult literacy and ‘conscientisation’. These were immediately published by that journal as a monograph under the title Cultural Action for Freedom. Two years later they were reissued under the same title by Penguin Books in Britain. The opportunity to work in North America also brought Freire into contact with other radical critics of education, particularly Jonathan Kozol and Ivan Illich. Freire participated in a series of seminars with Illich at the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca during the summers of 1969 and 1970. Initially Freire and Illich enjoyed a close personal friendship, but this has noticeably waned in recent years as their interests, activities and perspectives have increasingly diverged”.206 “Freire left Harvard in 1970 to take up his …appointment as special consultant to the office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva” says Mackie. “This has further enlarged the scope of his influence and practical involvement in education, especially in Africa. In the decade and a half since his exile from Brazil, Freire has worked in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau. In addition, he has participated in seminars and symposia in Canada, the USA, Italy, Iran, India, Australia and Papua – New Guinea. Recognition of Freire’s contribution to education was paid in 1973 by the Open University of Britain, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. The following year he went to Australia, under the sponsorship of Australian Council of Churches, to take part in a conference on ‘Education for liberation and Community’”.207 “As part of his work in Geneva”, says Robert Mackie, “Freire established the Institute of Cultural Action in 1971.This is an endeavour, through research and experimentation, to establish a political pedagogy based on conscientisation.Over the last few years the Institute has produced a series of documents focusing on the liberation of women, political education in Peru and the contradictions underlying aid programmes for the Third World. One of its recent publications highlights Freire’s work in Guinea–Bissau. Indeed, since 1975, Freire has become deeply involved in designing an educational process appropriate to the demands facing that newly independent country. An account of his activities in Guinea-Bissau was published in 1978 under the title Pedagogy in Process: the Letters to Guinea – Bissau….late in 1979, there were some indications that Freire’s long period of exile from Brazil may soon be over. In September of that year President Figueiredo granted amnesties to some five thousand Brazilian exiles and dissidents including Miguel Arraes and Paulo Freire.This enabled Freire to make a return to his homeland for the first time in fifteen years”.208 II

The first full-length book dedicated to analyse the life and work of Paulo Freire was written by Denis E. Collins, S.J., under the title Paulo Freire: His Life, Works 153

CHAPTER 2

and Thought. It is divided into two parts; the first part deals with his life and the second, with his philosophy. We are concerned here only with the first part. Collins writes, “It is fortunate that Paulo Freire and others have told us about his early life. He was born on September 19, 1921 in Recife, a port city of northeastern Brazil. He speaks gently and lovingly of his father, Joaquim Themistocles Freire, and of his mother, Edeltrus Neves Freire. It was they … who by example and love taught him to prize dialogue and to respect the choices of others”.209 It may be mentioned here, in passing, that Collins had long discussions with Freire himself about his life and philosophy before he committed himself to writing this book. Collins says that Freire’s parents belonged to the middle class but suffered financial reverses so severe during the Great Depression that Freire learned that what it is for a grade school child to go hungry.210 “The family had to move in 1931 to Jabatao where his father later died.”211 “Professor Richard Shaull recounts that”, says Collins, “at this stage Freire resolved to dedicate his life ‘to the struggle against hunger, so that other children would not have to know the agony he was experiencing.’”212. Collins mentions that Freire’s performance at school at the age of fifteen (though he was two years behind his age group in the classroom) was just barely adequate to qualify him for secondary school, but after his family situation improved a bit, he was able to complete school, and he entered the University of Recife where he enrolled in the Faculty of Law and also studied philosophy and the psychology of language while working part-time as an instructor of Portuguese in a secondary school.213 Collins also mentions the fact that in his adolescence, Freire questioned the discrepancy between what he heard being preached in church and what life was really like on weekdays. For about a year’s time he withdrew from the practice of Catholicism but returned to it because of the lectures of Tristao de Atayde.214 During this period, he was reading the works of Maritain, Bernanos, and Mounier, the Christian personalist who strongly influenced his educational philosophy.215 In 1944, says Collins, Freire married Elza Maia Costa Oliveira of Recife, a grade school teacher and later Principal. They had three daughters and two sons. During this period Freire’s interest in theories of education began to grow and that he read more in education, philosophy and the sociology of education than in law, a discipline in which he claimed he was only an average student.216 In fact, after passing the bar he quickly abandoned law as a means of earning a living in order to go to work as a welfare official and later as director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco.217 Freire’s experiences during those years of public service brought him into direct contact with the urban poor. The educational and organizational assignments he undertook there led him to begin to formulate the means of communicating with the dispossessed that would later develop into his dialogical methodology218, says Collins. He also mentions that Freire was awarded a doctoral degree in 1959. Denis mentions that in the early 1960s Brazil was a restless country. Numerous reform movements flourished simultaneously as socialists, communists, students, labor leaders, populists and Christian militants all sought their own socio-political goals. At that time Brazil had a population of 34.5 million people of whom only 154

PAULO FREIRE

15.5 million could vote. Widespread illiteracy among the rural poor (especially in the Northeast where Freire worked) served the interests of the dominant minority because eligibility for the franchise was dependent upon the ability to read and write. It is not surprising, comments Collins, that after the populist leader Joao Goulart replaced Janio Quadros as Brazil’s President in 1961, peasant leagues and other popular cultural movements aimed at consciousness-raising and nation-wide literacy campaigns such as the Basic Education Movement (MEB) sponsored by Brazilian bishops, intensified. Through the Federal Government’s Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE), under the direction of Celso Furtado, programmes to assist economic development in nine states included courses and scholarships for the training of scientists and specialists. Educational aid was later planned to extend to primary and adult literacy programmes in light of the special educational implications of the radical restructuring that SUDENE envisioned.219 It was in the midst of this ferment and heightened expectations that Paulo Freire became the first director of the University of Recife’s Cultural Extension Service which brought the literacy programmes now famous as The Metodo Paulo Freire to thousands of peasants in the northeast, remarks Collins. Later, from June 1963 up to March 1964, Freire’s teams worked throughout the entire nation.They claimed success in interesting adult illiterates in learning how to read and write in as short a time as forty-five days.220 “Why did Freire’s methods enjoy relative success? What made it appealing for campesinos who worked from dawn to dusk in the fields to attend sessions every night for six to eight weeks?”, asks Collins and he himself answers the question. “The answer,” he says, “lies in understanding the process of conscientizacao (conscientization), the word Freire uses to describe authentic education”. Collins further elaborates: By presenting participation in the political process through knowledge of reading and writing as a desirable and attainable goal for all Brazilians, Freire won the interest of the poor and gave them the hope that they could start to have a say in the larger issues of Brazilian life. Peasant passivity and fatalism waned as literacy became attainable and valued. Freire’s methods were incontestably politicizing”, emphasizes Collins, “and in the eyes of the Brazilian military and land – owners anxious to stave off societal change, outrageously radical”.221 Collins writes further, “…the military …overthrew the Goulart regime in Brazil in April 1964.All populist movements were suppressed and Freire was thrown into jail for his ‘subversive’ activities. He spent a total of seventy days there where he was repeatedly questioned and accused”.222 In prison he began his first major educational work, Education as the Practice of Freedom. “After his expulsion from Brazil,” says Collins, “Freire worked in Chile for five years with the adult education programs of the Eduardo Frei government headed by Waldemar Cortes who attracted international attention and UNESCO acknowledgement that Chile was one of the five nations of the world which had best succeeded in overcoming illiteracy. His work there was not confined to literacy campaigns. Frei’s Christian Democratic government was also interested in agrarian 155

CHAPTER 2

reform. Freire was able to continue to promote his educational ideas, addressing the problems of Chilean adult education in two works, Sobre la Accion Cultural and the essay Extensión o Communicacion?”.223 Collins further says, “One notes in Freire’s Chilean experiences a special importance regarding the first phase of the ‘Paulo Freire Method’, the thorough investigation of the culture and customs that shape the lives of illiterates. He had to work not only with a different language in Chile but with completely different kinds of urban and rural illiterates….Freire learned that in contrast to Brazil where illiterates had been readily interested in discussions about their lives, about human nature, and nature of knowing, the Chilean peasant tended lo lose interest if he did not begin to learn immediately. Freire had to start all over again in studying the first steps and devising generative words. The pictures and slides he used in Chile also had generative words superimposed upon the codification of rural culture”.224 Collins also adds that Freire “rejected Brazilian and Chilean primers because they imposed cultural values of the middle and wealthy classes upon the peasants ….In Chile, Freire became a critic of traditional extension education because he found it guilty of modernizing without developing.”225 In his book Sobre la Accion Cultural written in Chile, Freire discussed the problems of cultural change which go hand in hand with teaching and learning new skills. The essays in the book were intended as pedagogical aids to facilitate cultural change by humanizing the agrarian reform. “To my knowledge,” says Collins, “Sobre la Accion Cultural is the first written work in which Freire identifies traditional education as ‘banking education’. The latter is a deliberately chosen metaphor by which he accuses all who disagree with his concept of humanistic education of being paternalistic exploiters, willing to teach skills or to change social patterns only insofar as they will receive a return on their investments.”226 It is the first book in which he names his pedagogy “cultural action for freedom” – a phrase used later as the title of one of the books he wrote in the United States, informs Collins. Toward the end of 1960s, Freire’s work brought him into contact with a new culture that changed his thought significantly, says Collins. At the invitation of Harvard University, he left Latin America to come to the United States where he taught as visiting professor at Harvard’s Centre for Studies in Education and Development and was also a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Development and Social Change. Those years were, says Collins, a period of violent unrest in the United States when opposition to the country’s involvement in Southeast Asia brought police and militias into university campuses. Racial unrest had since 1965 flared into violence on the streets of American cities. Minority spokesmen and war protesters were publishing and teaching. They influenced Freire profoundly, says Collins. His reading of the American scene was an awakening to him because he found that repression and exclusion of the powerless from economic and political life was not limited to third world countries and cultures of dependence. Paulo Freire extended his definition of the third world from geographical concern to a political concept, remarks Collins.227 During 1969-70, Collins reports, Paulo Freire published two articles for the Harvard Educational Review entitled, ‘Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action 156

PAULO FREIRE

for Freedom’ and ‘Cultural Action and Conscientization’. The two papers sumarized for the first time in English most of his educational theories previously elaborated in Portuguese and Spanish works. The same articles were also released in a joint publication of the Harvard Educational Review and the Center for the Study of Development and Social Change in a booklet entitled Cultural Action for Freedom. It was followed shortly by the English translation of his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is interesting to note here that a reviewer named Edgar Friedenberg said of this book a “wooden translation” and a “truly bad book”.228 Some other reviewers complained that Freire had painted an oversimplified, excessively black and white picture of socio-political reality.229 He was faulted by many readers for a too ready approval of revolutionary violence as the only solution to oppressive education. He was even accused of being ambiguous, a mythmaker and impractical and of being an oppressor himself. In addition, he was severely criticized for his lack of originality. David Harmon’s observation that Freire’s justification of violence in the name of liberation was so considerable that it obscured his other contributions to education does seem to hit the mark.230 Collins says further, “For the past five years Freire has remained in exile from Brazil, making his home with his wife in Geneva. Most, if not all, of his children are now married. He serves as Special Educational Consultant to the World Council of Churches and has spent the first part of 1970s travelling all over the world lecturing and devoting his efforts to assisting educational programmes of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, such as Tanzania. He also serves as Chairman of the executive committee of the Institut d’Action Culturelle (IDAC) which is headquartered in Geneva. IDAC is a non-profit organization formed by people who wish to pursue through study and experimentation the possibility of education through conscientization”.231 III

The most controversial among the authors who wrote on Freire is Paul.V.Taylor, the writer of The texts of Paulo Freire. He has questioned many of Freire’s assumptions and postulates. In ‘Introduction: The textualizing and contextualizing of Freire’, he writes, “Paulo Freire, educator, philosopher and political activator, has the capacity to excite and frustrate friends and critics alike. He is not, apparently, a man about whom one remains neutral. With almost cultic status, he has been called the greatest living educator, a master and teacher, first among a dying class of modern revolutionaries who fight for social justice and transformation. His pedagogy is epoch – making: he is a legend in his own time”. But is he a living legend still relevant today? “For some,” continues Taylor, “he represents the period of youth, idealism and enthusiasism which was fashionable in the late 1960s and early 1970s but which since has been tainted with disillusion and middle-age.”232 He again writes, “There is no shortage of critics who blame Freire himself for this lack of clarity and for creating a magma of texts, analyses and reflections beneath the apparently solid crust of his literacy method. They point to the contorted manner of his writing; his lack of human experience; his circular logic and confusing repetitiveness. He is obscurantist, too mystifying, too abstract, too psychological, 157

CHAPTER 2

too utopian. His method requires a high level of social manipulation and can be used equally to domesticate as to liberate.”233 A reader of Taylor will discover in no time that the author himself shares many of the criticisms. “With Freire,” writes Taylor, “…textualising is no easy task. His sincerity is not in doubt;….The difficulties lie rather in establishing a proper image of the man himself and a clear catalogue of his work….I have preferred to use the term ‘bio-text’ rather than biography ….First, because Freire has always insisted on writing his own life in his own script… Second, ‘bio-text’ draws attention to the fact that this study is a reading of Freire, in the fullest sense of the word.”234 Taylor has many objections. The books that were published transcribing the dialogues between Freire and a host of other authors, are termed as ‘talked books’. Taylor questions the authorship of those publications. He further writes, “Freire’s work, which has been published in seventeen languages, appears, in the main, in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and German. Not only does that create a mixed vocabulary (for example, educaç.ao, educaćion, education; conscientizaç.ao, conscientizaćion, conscientization; culture circle, circulo de cultura) where the apparently similar words are nuanced and do not necessarily mean the same, but also it frequently causes his work to suffer either from cross-translation (for example, does ‘Bewuβteinsbildung’ convey the meaning of ‘education for critical consciousness’?) or from repeated publication, or from both”.235 Taylor then objects to the editorial presentation of the original and translated texts where the translations have slightly differed from the original in terms of quotations in the text, footnotes used etc. Regarding Freire’s eclecticism, he writes, “He is not a pedagogic Copernicus, who, alone, found a new way of looking at the universe of education. He is rather a syndicate of theories and insights. His particular genius lies in his ability to construct out of all these disparate ingredients a recipe that produces both a philosophy and a practice of literacy. His achievement, more Newtonian than Copernican, was to analyse the gravitational pull between power and literacy and to suggest that it would be possible to create a new dynamic of education”.236 Taylor further writes, “The ‘reading’ of Freire, therefore requires triple redaction: the auto-text or bio-text which interlinks biographical details; the grapho-text, penned or dictated, of his books, articles and interviews; and the altero-text or context which is supplied by other co-’writers’, the acknowledged or unacknowledged sources on which he relied and the historical circumstances through which he lived.”237 Taylor wants his readers to consider: “that an upper class Brazilian lawyer should become the pedagogue of the oppressed masses, not just in his own country but throughout the Third and First worlds; that his successful literacy method is based on flawed theorizing; that Dialogic Education may only be a benign form of Banking Education; that this very South American approach to Education can be placed firmly within mainstream European traditions; and that, despite all the contradictions and inadequacies, Freire offers a unique insight into the way Literacy presents and manages the fundamental relationship of Power and Knowledge.”238 A formidable task indeed! “The life and work of Paulo Freire has many phases and many facets as befits a man who has always been physically and mentally ‘in transit’. He has lived 158

PAULO FREIRE

through anonymity and fame in Brazil, acclamation and success in the wider world of Africa and Europe, and is now back in South America, living perhaps more on remembrances and mature reflection rather than on the impulsiveness and vigour of the creativity which drove him in the early years,”239 says Taylor. With these introductory remarks, we are rather ready for the following assessment. “He was born into a comfortable, middle-class family – an unlikely setting, culturally, economically and socially, for someone who was to become one of the great champions of the oppressed poor. Indeed, even up to the time when he started work as a trade union lawyer, Freire’s only exposure to the working and non-working classes had been when the family suffered severe, but temporary, financial difficulties during the Depression”.240 Taylor further states that the setback almost prejudiced his schooling. Although he could read before he went to school, poverty or hunger or lack of application, caused him to repeat two years of education, resulting in a delayed entry into university.241 Taylor writes, “…when the family was financially and socially back on course, it went without question that Freire should go to university to study Law. What is interesting, however, is that the local university was in many ways a French academic institution. The Brazilian tertiary system of education, in its choice of disciplines and in its structuring of examinations and degrees, had been modelled on that of the French. The content and style of courses had been strongly influenced by the core group of French intellectuals who were a major influence in the development and expansion of the universities in Brazil and who enabled the Faculty of Social Science, which included Law, to be the elite cornerstone of that expansion. It was through the resources of their libraries and teaching that Freire was introduced to the works of Althusser, Foucault, Fromm, Levi-Strauss, Maritain, Mounier and Sartre, all of whom were to have such a formidable influence on the development of his pedagogy.”242 The groves of academe clearly suited Freire, the intellectual, comments Taylor, but it gave him little sense of direction as he left university. In quick turns, he became a lawyer, a high school teacher of Portuguese, and then an adult educator, married but unsure whether his career options would be curtailed by family responsibility.243 Looking back, continues Taylor, one has the impression that those experiences between 1944 and 1959, about which little has ever been said, are almost ‘lost years’ for Freire. In the event, a career was thrust upon him. By the genius of fate, Freire was the right man in the right place at the right time, qualified by the rare mix of his experiences and skills to accept the invitation to direct the government’s literacy programme in the North-east state of Brazil.244 Since those university days, says Taylor, Freire, mainly because of his education and class, has never been poor or unemployed. He has always been ‘invited’ to take up his various posts and has never had to look for work. Yet with the security of a job, a wife and family, even with house servants, he felt empowered to create a pedagogy of the oppressed.245 Without the evidence of a detailed bio-text that would clarify the options and motivations of Freire’s choice of career, writes Taylor, an objective biographer of those days might be justified in saying simply that Freire was able to turn his initial 159

CHAPTER 2

interest in language and communication to his longer term, professional advantage. His move into education was pragmatic and opportunist.246 Taylor says that in 1944, through his wife Elza, Freire became involved in the Catholic Action Movement. Not surprisingly, remarks Taylor, Catholic Action was not the answer for Freire. It was rather a very disheartening experience as he discovered the intransigence of the middle classes, forcing him to make a conscious choice. Taylor quotes Freire, ‘We decided not to keep working with the bourgeois and instead to work with the people’.247 Through his close relationship with Dom Helder Camara, the Bishop of Recife, writes Taylor, Freire became closely involved in the Basic Church Communities …. which were developing a pastoral ministry through community groups that sought to relate their biblical study to local, social and personal issues.248 It was through his involvement in the Church that Freire was invited by … a ‘private industrial institute’ to be the coordinator of a programme concerned with education and culture.249 Regarding Paulo Freire’s submission of thesis for a doctoral degree in 1959, Taylor writes, “Why, at the age of 38, married and with a secure job, did he feel compelled to write up his ideas on adult education? Was it that he was looking to hasten the offer of the teaching post at the university which did, in fact, materialize shortly afterwards”? And he adds, “We may never know, but it is clear that that work experience, plus the doctorate, provided the incentive for a confrere of Juliåo, Miguel Arraes, then the Mayor of Recife, to invite Freire to construct a literacy programme for the city council in 1961”.250 As for Freire’s political beliefs, Taylor writes, Freire probably was to be counted among those with a horror of ideological embroilment, for the direct, political implications of this concerted social development seemed to have escaped him at this point. He may refer to ‘those political-pedagogical activities in which I have been engaged since my youth’ but his later reflections appear more accurate: ‘When I began my educational practice, I was not clear about the potential political consequences’.251 As an educator, in 1961, Freire was writing his first book: A Proposito de Uma Administracåo. This was essentially an appeal, says Taylor, for the university to become more relevant to the lives of the ordinary people and to create learning that confronted the social realities in Brazil. He saw universities in developing countries, especially those modelled on European countries, as incapable of combating social alienation precisely because the responses or remedies which they offered, were being transplanted from other cultures, disregarding their own particular context and culture.252 In this light, adds Taylor, it has been suggested that Freire did not promote literacy for its own sake, but saw it rather as bringing about the democratization of culture among the rural and urban illiterates of Brazil. If this is true, then Freire’s project did indeed constitute a major effort against the elitism of the university based education system.253 On the subject of receiving USAID fund for the literacy project, Taylor writes, “From October 1962 to January 1964, the Cultural Extension Service received considerable financial assistance from the United States Agency for International 160

PAULO FREIRE

Development (USAID), clearly not without Freire’s knowledge and approval. This shows, once again, his ability to make the pragmatic choice or compromise.”254 “Whatever the political or even pedagogic content of this first initiative,” writes Taylor, “its social and media impact at a national level was such that Freire was invited, in 1963, to extend his programme and to become the director of a national literacy programme.”255 “A National Development Plan was produced which aimed to enrol some two million people and to teach them in Culture Circles of twenty-five people, each circle lasting three months, at the extraordinary, direct cost of some $5–7 per Circle. The cost- effectiveness of the programme was achieved in part through the import of Polish projectors which cost $2.50 each, and films costing $1, a fact which, however, brought Freire into disrepute for it aggravated charges against him that he was undermining the national economy and was ‘attempting to bolshevize the country’. This was never even remotely true, given his background and personality. He had simply modelled his programme on the very successful Cuban Literacy Project which had been completed a year before. Much of the organigational structure of the Brazilian National Plan, which Freire would use substantially again in Guinea – Bissau owes much to that Cuban experiment”, wites Taylos.256 “……Freire found that he had unleashed some unexpected, and not altogether desired, developments.’’ says Taylor. “For example, in the state of Sergipé, the number of literate people went from 9,000 to 80,000 and in Pernambuco, from 800,000 to 1.3 million.The implications both for regional or national democracy, and thereby for the ruling classes were enormous .Under the legacy of Portuguese colonialism, only those who could read and write were eligible to vote. Brazil in 1960 had a population of some 34.5 million people of whom only 15.5 million were eligible to vote. Freire’s estimates for 1964 were that 4 million school-aged children lacked schools and there were 16 million illiterates of 14 years and older.”257 “Almost overnight, therefore, the whole electoral base of the country”, says Taylor, “had been overturned, a fact which suggests that the motivation of the peasants was more than a simple desire for literacy. The central demand for the trade unions and of the Movement for Popular Culture in Recifé, the demand for the vote (and thereby power to demand further economic and industrical reform, the right of free association and security of land tenure), not only had been acquired without bloodshed but also had been given to them by a governmental literacy campaign.”258 Taylor continues, “While it is true that he may have been regarded as a somewhat maverick professor of an otherwise traditional university, and that he was a director of a national literacy programme, he was none the less marginalized geographically by working from Recife, and that the scale of his success was more regional than national.”259 Taylor mentions that Freire was “criticized immediately, for example, in the powerful Rio de Janeiro daily, O Globo, for bringing the country to the verge of revolution.”260 “Many people saw Acao Popular and Basic Education Movement (MEB) programme of mass literacy only as a subversive strategy to introduce the agrarian reforms to which they were totally opposed”, says Taylor.261 161

CHAPTER 2

IV

Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work gives important details which only the intimacy that Moacir Gadotti had with Freire could provide. He records that Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was born in Recife, in the district of Casa Amarela, in house number 724 on the road to Encanamento. Paulo’s father was responsible for his name. It should have been Re-gu-lus but a mistake was made in the registry office.262 His mother who was ten years’ younger than his father, was a spiritualist. She had completed high school and knew French.263 Paulo Freire, says Gadotti “at a very early age …knew the meaning of hunger and misery...”264 The great depression and the death of his father … meant that his studies had to be put off. He only entered the high school when he was sixteen. All his classmates were eleven or twelve. “Paulo recounts that”, writes Gadotti, “all his classmates were well-dressed, well-fed, and came from homes which had a certain culture……. ‘I was tall, lanky wore pants which were too short and risked being made fun of because of their length. They were shorter than the length of my legs.’”265 He rejected his own body which was too bony.266 But living in Jaboatao, says Moacir, “playing knockabout games of soccer, he also had contact with children and teenagers from poor rural families and the children of workers who lived in the hills or near the canals. ‘My experience with them’, Moacir quotes Paulo, ‘helped me to get used to a different way of thinking and expressing myself. This was the grammar of the people, the language of the people, and as an educator of the people, I devote myself today to the rigorous understanding of this language’”.267 His mother, says Moacir, brought him up in the Catholic religion, and this would also be an important influence both on his pedagogical theories and on his practice – he was a militant in the Catholic Action Movement.268 Moacir also notes that Paulo Freire and Elza, his wife, had five children. Maria Madalena, Maria Cristina, Maria de Fátima, Joaquim and Lutgardes. The daughters followed the footsteps of their father and became educators.269 Moacir quotes Freire about his appreciation of Elza: “Elza was marvellous and continues to be.She is a permanent presence and stimulation in my life.”270 On his passion for teaching, Freire says, “I wanted very much to study but I could’nt as our economic condition didn’t allow me to. I tried to read or pay attention in the classroom but I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge. So, because of my problems, my older brother began to work and to help us and I began to eat more. At that time, I was in the second or third year of the high school and I always had problems. When I began to eat better, I began understanding better what I was reading. It was just at this time that I began to study grammar as I loved language problems. I studied the philosophy of language on my own and got myself ready to understand structuralism and language when I was eighteen or nineteen. Then I began teaching Portuguese grammar with love for language and philosophy and with the intuition that I should understand the expectations of the pupils and make them participate in the dialogue.At a certain moment, 162

PAULO FREIRE

between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, I discovered that teaching was my profession”271 Paulo Freire, Moacir observes, was one of the founders of Cultural Extension Service of the University of Recife and its first director. In his study of literacy during this period, whereby he developed a new method of teaching adult illiterates, which he demonstrated in 1958 at the Rigional Preparatory Seminar in Pernambuco under the title “Adult Education and Marginal Populations: The Problem of the Mocombos (Slums in the Northeast Brazil).” In 1959, Paulo wrote “Present-day Education in Brazil” which was the thesis with which he competed for the Chair of History and Philosophy of Education in the School of Fine Arts of Recife. This thesis gave him his Ph.D Moacir, says Moacir.272 Moacir quotes de Ruí Beisiegel on the content of his thesis: “Paulo Freire criticizes Brazilian school education and proposes radical revision starting from the study of the needs of the educational process in particular historical circumstances. ….The style, though not forceful, does not hide Paulo Freire’s acceptance of a decisive point of view: all considerations of Brazilian school education cannot develop in the emptiness of abstract propositions.”273 Freire was then influenced by authors like Roland Corbisier, Alvaro Vieira Pinto, and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, the nationalist developmentalist thinkers.274 Regarding Freire’s literacy method, Moacir Gadotti writes, “Paulo Freire’s ideas of literacy and his theories of knowledge must be understood in their context: the circumstances of the Northeast of Brazil at the beginning of the sixties, where half of the inhabitants lived in the culture of silence – they were illiterate. It was necessary to ‘give them the word’ so that they could ‘move’ and could participate in the construction of a Brazil where they would be responsible for their own destiny and where colonialism would be overcome.”275 Paulo Freire, writes Moacir, presented his literacy method in a more detailed form in 1967 in the book Education as a Practice of Freedom. This book was the result of the collective experience of more than fifteen years of work in adult literacy in both urban and rural proletarian and sub-proletarian areas and was helped enormously by the experience of Paulo Freire’s sweetheart, wife and companion, Elza.276 Paulo Freire discovered that “the form of working, the process of the act of learning, was a determining factor in relation to the content of learning. It was not possible, for example, to learn how to be a democrat with authoritarian methods”.277 In 1963, Darcy Ribeiro, Minister of Education in the Joao Goulart government, asked Paulo Freire to represent the Ministry of Education in SUDENE, informs Moacir. Although it was a non-paying job, it had considerable political significance. This was the time when the Alliance for Progress was entering into a number of agreements in the field of education. In the Northwestern state of Rio Grande do Norte, Paulo Freire was approached by the Secretary of Education regarding the possibility of taking up literacy programme there. One of the demands made by Paulo Freire was that the town chosen for the first experiment was not to be visited by the governor since it might be interpreted as a political programme.278 The team coordinated by a law student named Marcos Guerra went to Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte, to train a group of teachers. Then they went to 163

CHAPTER 2

Angicos to work on the vocabulary universe of the region and to begin the literacy work. After this the team went to live there. A month later, three hundred formerly illiterate pupils were reading and writing.279 The Angicos experiment was publicized throughout Brazil, says Moacir. President Joao Goulart paid a visit together with all his colleagues of the cabinet. Paulo Freire was later invited to coordinate the National Literacy Plan.280 The experiment in Angicos had been financed by the Alliance for Progress. Later, in view of the progressive political content of the work of Paulo Freire, the financial support was withdrawn.281 “On March 30, 1964, informs Moacir Gadotti, Paulo Freire was taking part in a course in Goiãnia, when he received a telephone call from his assistant telling him that the news from the federal capital of Brasilia was not good and that he should go back to Brasilia on the same day.”282 There was a coup. Immediately after the coup, Paulo Freire sought refuge in the home of his friend Luis Bronzeado, a parliamentary deputy. He was then sure that he would be imprisoned .Later when he voluntarily presented himself to the security chief, he was told that, “you may be called later to make a statement”283 On June 16, 1964 two policemen asked Freire to accompany them.284 He was considered by the military authority as an ‘international subversive’ and a ‘traitor to Christ and Brazilian people’. “Do you deny”, one of the judges asked him, “that your method is similar to that of Stalin, Hitler, Peron and Mussolini? Do you deny that with your so-called method you want to make Brazil a Bolshevik country?” Later, Moacir informs us, the process initiated against Paulo Freire was shelved through “ineptness of accusations”.285 “This experience,” writes Moacir, “which lasted seventy days, was sufficiently traumatic …”286 After his days in prison, Paulo Freire thought that in such a period of extremes and irrationality, it would be risky to stay in the country. At that time, the Bolivian embassy was the only one which welcomed him. Then he was contacted by the Bolivian Ministry of Education, who sought his help in both child and adult literacy schemes. However, Moacir adds, he had difficulty with the altitude of La Paz (twelve thousand feet above sea level), where he fainted when he arrived. In addition, twenty days after his arrival, a coup overthrew the government of Paz Estensoro. Neither he nor other Brazilians in La Paz were affected, but now he was unable to continue living there.287 When the coup took place in Brazil in 1964, Chile was getting ready for its September Presidential elections. The candidates were Eduardo Frei, of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and Salvador Allende of Popular Action Forum(FRAP).The right wing withdrew support from its candidate and supported PDC which won the elections.288 The PDC started some important reforms, especially in the field of education which considerably advanced the process of democratization of education.289 The period in exile, writes Moacir Gadotti, was extremely important for Paulo Freire. In Chile, he found a rich and satisfying political space which was socially and educationally dynamic and which allowed him to restudy his method in other historical circumstances.290 164

PAULO FREIRE

In his work in Chile, Paulo Freire got support from the left. But he was opposed by the right-wing opposition which accused him of writing a ‘very violent’ book against Christian democracy. The book in question was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This accusation was one of the factors which made Paulo Freire leave Chile in 1969, informs Moacir.291 Elza, we are informed, was never actually exiled. She took on the position of an exile to such an extent that she several times refused the offer of a brother who would pay for her to travel to Recife. Her reason was that she could not tread in an airport that was forbidden to her husband. “It was a political rather than an existential position”. In 1969, writes Moacir, Paulo Freire received a letter from Harvard University inviting him to work there for two years. Eight days later, he received a letter from the World Council of Churches in Geneva. This organization had played a very important role when African countries began to rebel against the hegemony of colonial rule and was involved in forms of liberation throughout the continent, supporting organizations like PAIGC of Amilcar Cabral, MPLA in Angola, and FRELIMO in Mozambique. Paulo Freire believed this organization to have considerable historical importance.292 Moacir writes, “Between 1975 and 1978 Paulo Freire worked in São Tomé and Principe ….Four years later, Paulo Freire received a letter from the Minister of Education, who said that 55 per cent of all those enrolled and 72 per cent of those who finished the course had become literate..”293 Moacir describes how Freire met Christ and Marx: “…once, when he was still very young, he went to the canals and hills in the rural backwaters near Recife ‘compelled by a certain pleasant and daring intimacy with Christ’ and full of a “sweety Christian” vision. Once there, the dramatic and challenging reality of the people took him back to Marx, who didn’t prevent him from finding Christ in the alleys.”294 A year before receiving amnesty, Moacir informs us, Paulo Freire had been invited to return to Brazil to take part in the First Seminar of Brazilian Education, but once again, he was refused a passport. The organizers of the seminar, which took place in Campinas, managed to get past the censor by presenting a recorded telephone message from Paulo Freire to the eight hundred participants. In this message, he spoke of the enormous nostalgia he felt for the smell and taste of Brazil, from which he was far and from which he would never be far…295 After obtaining a court order, Paulo Freire managed to get the passport which had been systematically denied him by various Brazilian consulates in a number of countries. After fifteen years in exile, he returned at the age of fifty-seven. When he was still in exile, he had founded CDES (Centre for Study of Education and Society) and its journal Educação e Sociedade (Education and Society) during the First Seminar of Brazilian Education in 1978.296 In 1981, he helped found Vereda, the Center for Studies in Education in São Paulo .The Center was responsible for research, assistance and training of teachers who would work in the area of popular education.297 Moacir writes that since his return to Brazil, Paulo Freire took part in many events, courses, and seminars in the most diverse institutions, always treating them as political and pedagogical acts. 165

CHAPTER 2

Together with Martin Carnoy, he gave an intensive course in the School of Education at Stanford University, California, and he opened the Education forum in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, in August 1983. He received diverse homages and various titles, such as the King Balduin Prize for International Development, in Belgium, and the Unesco 1986 Prize for Education for Peace… He was a Consultant at the University of Campinas and at the Catholic University of Campinas… In 1980, he joined the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party) in Sao Paulo. From 1980 to 1986 he worked as director and founder of the Wilson Pinheiro Foundation, which was linked to PT…298 At the age of seventy one, writes Moacir, known throughout the world as the greatest educator of our time, Paulo Freire lost his wife, which hurt him tremendously. We could imagine that there wouldn’t be anything left for him to do. But that did not happen. After spending some months in pain, struggling not to get depressed, Paulo Freire began again to slowly involve himself with education and with change. Paulo Freire was able to put his ideas into practice as Secretary of Education from 1986 to 1991 in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city with a population of twelve million. On November 15, 1988, the PT won the municipal elections in Sao Paulo. Paulo Freire was nominated as Secretary of Education and took up the position on January 1, 1989. He further adds that in nearly two years as head of the Municipal Secretariat of Education, Paulo Freire was able to set up a team of five to six advisors who were allowed to work with great autonomy….299 Paulo Freire intended to train teachers for a new pedagogical posture, considering above all Brazil’s five-hundred – year authoritarian tradition.300 NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, p. 13. Ibid, pp. 13–14. Ibid, p. 14. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 15 Sukanta Bhattacharya, Sukanta Samagra (Collected works of Sukanta Bhattacharya), Patra–Bharati, Kolkata, 2008, p. 88. Oh Great Life Oh great life, no more this poetry, Bring in hard and harsh prose, Let poetry vanish with all its rhyme, Chime and alliterations, Strike now with the hammer of prose. No need of the beauty of the lyric, I bid thee farewell, In the world of hunger, it is all prose. The full moon looks like a hot round bread. [English transcreation by Asoke Bhattacharya] n. 1, p. 16.

166

PAULO FREIRE 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid, pp. 17–18. Ibid, p. 18. Ibid, p. 19. Ibid, p. 19. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, pp. 22–23. Ibid, pp. 23–24. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 26 Ibid, p. 27 Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, pp. 28–29. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 32 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, 1966, pp. 41–42. n. 1, p. 32. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 37 Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 40. Ibid, p. 40. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, pp. 50. Ibid, pp. 50–51. Ibid, p. 51–52. Ibid, pp. 53. Ibid, p. 55–56. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 63 Ibid, p. 63. Ibid, p. 63 Ibid, pp. 71. Ibid, p. 71–72. Ibid, p. 73. Ibid, p. 75. Ibid, p. 81. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, Continuum, N.Y, 1998, p. 14. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 15. 167

CHAPTER 2 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, pp. 15–16. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, pp. 23–26. Ibid, p. 27. n. 1, p. 92. Ibid, p. 99. Ibid, p. 99. n. 57, p. 18. Ibid, p. 19. Ibid, p. 20. n. 1, pp. 109–110. Ibid, pp. 110. Ibid, p. 112. Ibid, p. 112. Ibid, p. 116. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 121. Ibid, p. 122 Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 120. Ibid, p. 128–129. Ibid, p. 131. Ibid, p. 132. Ibid, p. 133. Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, p. 138. n. 57, p. 31. Ibid, p. 32. Marcel Niedergang, The Twenty Latin Americas 2, Penguin, Middlesex, UK, 1971, pp. 68–69. n. 57, pp. 68–69. John D. Holst, “Paulo Freire in Chile, 1964–69” in Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 76, No. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 243–260. Richard Gott, “Introduction” in Salvador Allende, Chile’s Road to Socialism, Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex, England, p. 19. Ibid, p. 19. n. 94, p. 255. Ibid, p. 256. Ibid, p. 257. Victor Shragin, Chile Corvalan Struggle, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1997, pp. 68–69. n. 94, p. 259. Ibid. Ibid, pp. 259–260. Ibid, p. 260. Ibid, pp. 260–261. Ibid, p. 261. n. 57, p. 34. n. 57, p. 35. Ibid, pp. 35–36.

168

PAULO FREIRE 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155

156 157 158 159

Ibid, p. 38. Ibid, Ibid, pp. 38–39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 40. Ibid, p. 45. Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, p. 59. Ibid, pp. 67. Ibid, pp. 67. Ibid, pp. 67–68. Ibid, pp. 69–70. Ibid, p. 75. Ibid, pp. 75–76. Ibid, p. 76. Ibid, p. 78–79. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 92. Ibid, p. 104. Ibid, p. 104. Ibid, p. 104. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, p. 107. Ibid, p. 126. Ibid, p. 126. Ibid, p. 130. Ibid, p. 131. Ibid, p. 144. Jonathan Kozol, Foreword in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process; The Letters to Guinea Bissau, The Seabury Press, New York, 1978, p. 4. Ibid, p. 8. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 17. Ibid, p. 20. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Bergin and Garvey Publishers, Inc., Massachusetts, 1987, p. 69. Ibid, p. 69. n. 57, pp. 146–147. Ibid, p. 156. Ibid, p. 161. 169

CHAPTER 2 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196

197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208

Ibid, p. 164. Ibid, p. 165. Ibid, p. 165. Ibid, p. 170. Ibid, p. 177. Ibid, p. 177. Ibid, p. 186. Ibid, p. 195. Ana Maria Saul, “São Paulo’s Education Revisited” in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the City, Continuum, New York, 1993, p. 148. Ibid, p. 148. Ibid, pp. 148–149. Ibid, p. 152. Ibid, pp. 152–153. Ibid, pp. 153–154. Ibid, pp. 154–155. Ibid, p. 155. Ibid, p. 156. Ibid, p. 156. Ibid, pp. 156–157. Ibid, p. 158. Ibid, p. 159. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, p. 162. Ibid, p. 163. Ibid, pp. 164–165. Book review by David N. Plank, in American Journal of Education, February 1999, p. 182. Ibid, p. 182. Ibid, p. 183. Ibid, p. 183. Ibid, p. 183. Ibid, p. 183. Ibid, pp. 183–184. Ibid, p. 184. Ibid, p. 184. Michael W. Apple, Book Review in Comparative Education Review, May 1999, p. 235. Robert Mackie, Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Pluto Press, London, 1980, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, pp. 4–5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, pp. 5–6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, pp. 6–7. Ibid, p. 7. Ibid, p. 7–8.

170

PAULO FREIRE 209

210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232

233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258

Denis E. Collins, Paulo Freire: His Life, Works and Thought, Pluto Press, New York, Ramsay, Toronto, 1977, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, pp. 5–6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, pp. 6–7. Ibid, p. 7. Ibid, pp. 7–8. Ibid, pp. 8–9. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, pp. 13–14. Ibid, p. 14. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, pp. 18–19. Ibid, pp. 19–20. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, pp. 22–23. Paul V. Taylor, The Texts of Paulo Freire, Open University Press, Buckingham/Philadelphia, 1993, p. 1. Ibid, p. 2. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, pp. 12–13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid, pp. 23–24. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, p. 24. Ibid, pp. 24–25. Ibid, p. 25. 171

CHAPTER 2 259 260 261 262

263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300

Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 25. Moacir Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Thought, State University of New York, 1994, p. 1. Ibid, p. 1. Ibid, pp. 2–3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 8. Ibid, pp. 8–9. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 18. Ibid, p. 31. Ibid, pp. 31–32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, pp. 35–36. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid, p. 37. Ibid, p. 38. Ibid, pp. 39–40. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 64. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, pp. 76–77. Ibid, pp. 98–100. Ibid, p. 101.

172

CHAPTER 3

CRITIQUE OF PAULO FREIRE’S MAJOR WORKS

To understand Paulo Freire and to posit him properly in the historical context it is necessary to understand Brazil, the enormous land mass that occupies half of the territory of Latin America. Ever since the Europeans set foot on frontiers beyond seas, they unleashed a regime of exploitation, subjugation and plunder which swept through the whole continents, mauling, maiming and exterminating hundreds of thousands of people. The theatres of operation were vast and of unimaginable dimension. This saga of human degradation and suffering – in its manifold forms – could constitute thousands of pages of shocking literature like the Mahabharatas if those events were recorded in black and white. Eduardo Galeano showed the outside world the open veins of Latin America,1 Brazil included. Some like Darcy Ribeiro2 brought to light the open wounds of Brazil. Paulo Freire said in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed3 that though humanization was the watchword of modern civilization, yet it had been observed more in violation than in observance. Hunger, that eats the body and benumbs the soul, which Freire experienced in his childhood and adolescence, devastated the whole of Brazil’s poor folks in the Northeast, as studied in the Geopolitics of Hunger4 by Josué de Castro. A critique of Paulo Freire’s major works is only possible in the backdrop of the Brazilian history of exploitation and extermination, hunger and malnutrition, and, of course, the people’s desire for democracy, human rights and peace. Hunger and Underdevelopment in Brazil5 Investigation of living conditions in the American continent in the 1950s and 1960s revealed that the western hemisphere was one of the greatest flashpoints of malnutrition and hunger. Brazil had the dubious distinction of providing some of the starkest examples of poverty in the world. Northeastern Brazil, once one of the richest regions of natural resources of the sub-continent, came to be regarded as an archetype of mass starvation like Kalahandi in India and Ethiopia and Somalia in Africa. During the period of heavy internal migration in Brazil, hundreds of thousands of people had left their ancestral homes in the Northeast and migrated to the prosperous southern region. Initially, these people were no match for the Italian colonists or the better-fed southerners. But with good nutrition, they transformed themselves into magnificent workers. They built many towns and cities, including Brasilia. In the Northeastern sugar plantations, a person had an average intake of 1700 calories. In the rubber extraction region, the worker had an intake of 1800 to 2000 calories. However, a normal human being needs 2800–3000 calories daily from his/her diet as set by dieticians universally, according to Josúe de Castro. 173

CHAPTER 3

Only 19 percent of the families in the Northeast had any access to milk. Cheese and eggs were practically unknown. Their normal sources of protein were corn, beans, certain tubers and roots. These did not contain high value protein. The children of the poor suffered from hidden protein deficiency. The heavy carbohydrate content in their diet was awfully disproportionate to the normal quota of fat and protein. This resulted in a high incidence of beriberi and Vitamin B-1 deficiency. The most common mineral deficiencies were those of calcium, iron and iodine. In the lowlands, there was a shortage of sodium chloride. Calcium deficiency was widespread in the whole region, average intake being 50% of 0.80 gm recommended by the nutritionists. In Bahia, around 40% of the school children suffered from anaemia. With an addition of iron content in the diet, the rate dropped to 3% in four months. In places where hunger was more intense and ruthless, one came across the phenomenon of people’s habit of eating earth. An analysis of the clays eaten confirmed that those contained a high proportion of iron salts. As rubber rose to represent for a time 28 percent of Brazil’s total exports, a great flood of immigrants invaded the Amazon. These people came in successive waves. A majority of the hard frontiersmen, who took part in rubber rush, were struck down by beriberi. They usually arrived in good health and with a lot of enthusiasm. They would plunge into the jungle, along the rubber trail, bleed the trees and collect the precious milk. This was then smoked and the end-product was sold at fabulous prices. And then, just when the victory seemed assured, they would begin to feel that the ground was faltering beneath their feet. Their legs grew weak and lifeless, and a drowsiness would creep upward. A constriction in the chest seized them. It was beriberi, taking possession of their bodies and nerves. The woodsmen who had travelled hundreds of miles on foot, overcoming all the obstacles on their way, were powerless against beriberi. Then would come the swellings, the terrible dropsy with the skin of arms and legs stretched tight, oozing lymphs. In some cases the body would dry up, the muscles would be lost, and the flesh would melt away. Half of those who came to seek fortune, fell victim to this disease. The Northeast that Freire came across had terrible stories like this and many more. Illiterate and ignorant, deficient in body and spirit, these men and women, constituting the overwhelming majority of the region, created wealth and thus ensured the comfort enjoyed by the upper classes. Freire wanted to give these people a voice, a charter for existence, a culture of breaking their age old silence. UNITY IN DIVERSITY: OPEN WOUNDS OF BRAZIL THE RISE OF THE PROTO-BRAZILIANS6

A few decades after the European invasion of the continent of South America, a neoBrazilian ethnic identity began to take shape in Brazil. It differed in characteristics from the invading Portuguese masters and the conquered indigenous tribes. This embryonic ethnicity multiplied and spread over the vast territory of Brazil. It developed first along the Atlantic coast and then moved into the backlands. It went up the stream of the tributaries of the great rivers. Over time it also included the oppressed African races condemned to slavery. 174


Thus grew up various islands of a new human settlement – separated from each other but having one unmistakable mark of identity – Brazilian proto-ethnicity. Each of these islands of settlement survived by adjusting to the local conditions. With new migrations, either from Portugal or Africa or due to invasion into the territory of new indigenous tribes, the separate nucleus absorbed the newcomers into the already developed proto-cells. There was, however, one common link – all the proto-cells developed out of unimaginable oppression of the dominated races and tribes, a characteristic of Brazilian social history. The cultural islands of human settlement that developed over the centuries can be characterised as follows: the Creole culture which developed in the Northeast where the sugar plantations acted as the coordinating institution; the backwoods culture of the areas occupied by the Sao Paulo Mamulecos; the Backland culture of the Sertao; the Caboclo culture of the Amazons; and the Gaucho culture of livestock herding on the southern plains supplemented by the new migrations from Europe in the nineteenth century. Creole Brazil The sugar plantations needed fertile soil of unlimited expanse. And Brazil offered it. The early sugar mills extracted the sugar cane juice through a press made of wood and iron. The combination of this mill and sugar cane fields multiplied at a rapid speed. The only constraint was labour. The first sugar plantations appeared in Brazil around the 1520s and spread along the coast. The great plantations numbered around 200 during the peak of sugar production and employed around 30,000 slaves. The plantation master and the serving slaves constituted a structural unity that would adapt to diverse productive sectors. Both of them – the master and the slave – were creators of the Brazilian proto-ethnicity but differed from each other in their respective living conditions. The master, exploiter par excellence of the population under his command, was after all a Brazilian entrepreneur. He was a proto-Brazilian in his habits. The slave, indigenous or African, was also being Brazilianised. The master and the slave spoke the same language and developed the same world view – though quite diverse — which revolved round sugar. Both the master and the slave underwent profound transformation. The slaves, however, opposed the system by resorting to subversive actions which attracted the most severe retaliatory actions on behalf of the repressive apparatus at the command of the master. However, both the master and the slave, constituting polar opposites, were also the essential parts of the slave-holding system which gave rise to new forms of social organisations. The patriarch, his children, legitimate and illegitimate, wives and concubines constituted the social and economic milieu of the slave-holding society where the master and his sons were the freebreeders. Their offspring replenished a percentage of the slaves dying out due to excessive pressure of work and inhuman torture. They were also the nucleus of a new Brazilian ethnicity. The history of Brazil has been interpreted as an epic societal transformation which brought to existence a civilization of world extension that linked America 175

CHAPTER 3

as a settlement, Africa as the supplier of the labour force and Europe as the consumer. The sugar plantation model was subsequently replicated for tobacco, indigo and cacao. It was also used for various other export commodities, including rubber. However, the sugar plantation model reached the classical stage. The combination of the merchant’s monetary interest with the entrepreneurs’, who organised the production, and of the monarchy, which guaranteed monopoly of the commercial ventures, constituted a vicious circle – all for greater and greater profit of the constituents. In Brazil took shape a colonial slave-holding formation which was agro-mercantile in character. The enterprise reached worldwide proportions and controlled lives of millions across several continents. Production of sugar called for not only cultivation of sugar cane over a large area but participation of specialised workers as well as a large number of unskilled labourers who provided the manual work. All these attributes gave sugar production the character of an agro-industrial undertaking requiring large investment of capital. It looked very much like a factory-based production system much before the classical factory appeared in England and Holland. The average mill which produced between 700 and 800 tonnes of sugar per year had to engage dozens of slaves for hoeing and cutting. The carters would carry the cane and firewood to the mill. And a huge number of slaves would grind and purify the sugar. There would be a sugar master, a stoker and a sub-stoker, a purger, two bookkeepers, overseers in the fields and gardens and a chief overseer for the whole plantation. These persons received remuneration for their work. Then there were brick-makers and carpenters as well as mechanics. Over and above, there were house-slaves, slaves for carts and boats, cow-hands and kitchen slaves. The whole system was directly under the command of the master who owned the houses, installations, animals, people – everything. This highly centralized apparatus for profit treated everything – especially the slaves – as simple instruments for gain. This deculturised the work force beyond recognition. The plantation master enjoyed a hegemonic power in the established order of colonial life. This power took into its control the whole society. He was more powerful than the nobility in the mother country though he originated from them. To him bowed the clergy and the state administration. Together, they constituted the oligarchy. After the extinction of the indigenous population captured as slaves who worked in the plantations, Africans were imported. These people, taken captive in their own lands in Africa, were traded to the coast where they would be exchanged for tobacco, liquor and some other insignificant objects. Then they would be convoyed, tied neck to neck with other captives and pulled along by a rope to the post and to the slave ship. They would be placed on board with hundreds of other captives, occupying the minimum space the bodies could be squeezed into, eating the minimum, soiling the place where they would be tied; thus they would traverse a distance of thousands of miles on the sea, spending a month or more in that inhuman condition. If they survived the crossing, they would land up in another market upon embarkation, and assessed by their teeth, muscle and other physical conditions, 176


they would be auctioned and again convoyed, chained neck to neck. They would be brought to the owners of the sugar plantations. There they would work, eighteen hours a day, every day in the month, throughout the year. Without love, without family, without sex (except for the womenfolk who would be impregnated by the plantation owner or his sons or relatives), without an iota of humanity, ragged and dirty, ugly and smelly, mangy and sick, without any pleasure or pride, they would live their routine existence, suffering everyday the quota of lashes, and, occasionally, a heavier dose for the slightest insubordination. Exemplary punishments such as mutilation of fingers, notching of breasts, burning with hot coal were also meted out. Often the whole bunch of teeth of a person was broken and hundreds of lashes would be the fate of the more intransigent and rebellious. Creole Brazil was the product of the master and the slave who would undergo thorough transfiguration and constitute a new ethnicity. Caboclo Brazil The tropical forest of the Amazon basin covers almost half of Brazil. But only ten percent of the Brazilian population inhabit this region. This region was effectively incorporated into Brazil due to the Portuguese push to the west and a later migration of half a million northeasterners who fled hunger from the Northeast and the adjoining backlands to this region to extract rubber from the jungles in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Solimoes-Amazon river system extends over 3000 miles within Brazil. Large ships can enter the region from the Atlantic coast. The extensive natural network of tributaries increases the navigable area tenfold. It was originally peopled by indigenous tribes who adapted themselves to the tropical forest condition. The majority of these people practised the agricultural methods of the Tupis. The fluvial plains and fertile lands yielded the crops that the indigenous people consumed. This food was supplemented by hunting and fishing. There flourished an indigenous tribal culture which was quite rich. Clusters of villages supported thousands of residents in the complex. However, these were undifferentiated tribal societies which were rural and classless. Everyone took part in production. They achieved extraordinary skills in production of coloured and moulded ceramic items. The Portuguese occupation of the Amazon river basin was initially carried out to expel the French, Dutch and the English. The Portuguese, therefore, were engaged in battles with their adversaries. They built fortifications at various locations. The fortifications doubled as trading posts. These posts carried out a trade with the local indigenous population for various spices available in the Amazon jungles. This led to enslaving of the Indians and compelling them to perform regular collection of spices. They used to enslave the whole village, practically kept the women and children hostage and sent the menfolk in search for spices to the deep and dangerous jungle. When the Indians protested, they were ruthlessly dealt with by the masters’ armed militia. 177

CHAPTER 3

Thereafter, the Jesuits adopted a new method to get the jungle products from the Indians. The residents of the village complexes were divided into three groups. One third was reserved for the services to the priests; another third for crown services and engaged in building the public works and other such activities. The rest was divided among the colonists. The treatment of the Indians at the hands of the colonists was quite unbearable. However, the Jesuits treated them much more softly and allowed them to maintain a family life so that traditions could pass on. Indigenous people captured from other regions were kept inside these settlements. Many people died due to torture and many more fled the colonists. It was therefore necessary to continuously replenish the human labour force through fresh captures. Thus mixed populations from various tribes, including those reduced to slavery long before, began to inhabit these settlements. Thus took place a homogenization of language and culture. There also took place Tupinization of the original population of the Amazon. The organisation of the reduction settlements expanded throughout the river valley. These proto-Brazilians, now reduced to slavery, collected cacao, cloves, cinnamon, annatto, vanilla, saffron, sarsaparilla, quinine, puxuri and a great number of reeds, shells, roots, oils and resins for sale in Europe. The missionary settlements of the Jesuit priests performed an intensive acculturative action which permitted spread of craft techniques like weaving, building with stone and mortar, etc. Rice, sugar cane and indigo were cultivated in the settlements. Domestic animals such as hogs, chicken and cattle were introduced. The missionary villages also developed a folkloric and religious tradition which was essentially an intermingling of catholic and indigenous beliefs. By this process grew a new population which had lost connection with its original tribal tradition though remained tribal in its way of living. They spoke a tribal language which was not their own. They espoused a religion which was very different from their own religion. However, they could identify plants and creatures of the jungles, the variety of aquatic life, etc. They took their subsistence from garden plots of cassava, corn and other tropical plants inherited from their ancestors. They located and collected in the jungle the plants of commercial value. These indigenous people were not mere transmitters of knowledge for survival in the damp tropical forest. They were the wisdom, nerve and muscle of the parasitic society. They knew which way to follow, rowed canoes, opened paths in the jungles, discovered and exploited concentration of spices, worked the land and prepared the meals. The colonizer could never have survived in the jungle without the help of the Indians whom they tortured and killed in thousands. The Portuguese crown, in order to consolidate its occupation, introduced Azorean colonists to settle in this area. They came with their families along with their cattle population. Though initially they formed a small agricultural nuclei of their own, they were progressively absorbed by the way of life of the region. The Azoreans, however, established cattle ranches which enriched the economy of the region. Then, of course, took place the age-old process of formation of neo-Brazilians through the cross-breeding of white men and indigenous women. First, the Jesuits were expelled, then the missionary villages along with these Indians and herds 178


were redistributed among the Caboclo oligarchical class which took over the leadership of the region. With investments made from gold of Minas Gerais, large townships sprang up in the Amazon region. New communication links also developed. Though the extractive economy declined with the removal of the Jesuits, production of cotton and rice found a new international market during the crisis in the world cotton production as the battles between the North and the South raged during the American War of Independence. To boost production, African slave labour was also introduced in the region. As the crisis ended, the region again went into decadence. However, in the process, the aboriginal population was exterminated. It has been estimated that around two million people died as ‘civilization’ progressed in this region. The indigenous population was forced to work under conditions in which no human being could survive. The nascent Caboclo collaborators resorted to brutal repression only reminiscent of the Mamuleco atrocities in the Sao Paulo region. For five centuries, there was multiplication of a vast population of detribalized, deculturated mixed people who came into existence as a result of colonisation. Their tribal language was adopted; through ethnic disfiguration, they turned into ‘generic’ Indians. However, these same people were the captors and torturers of the Indians who inhabited the region. Two waves of violence befell the generic Indians, also known as Caboclo. The first came as the value of rubber skyrocketed in the world market. The Caboclos were recruited as vassals in this enterprise. With people coming from all over Brazil and inhabiting the region, the Caboclos lost their language – they became Portuguesespeaking. Then they lost their land. They were uprooted and thrown away. Driven by hunger, they thronged the cities as have-nots. The Amazon region experienced a period of prosperity motivated by the increasing price of rubber in the world market. Being the sole supplier, the region transformed its whole economy to take care of the massive demand. The population which was concentrated along the banks of the rivers Amazon and Solimoes spread out throughout the valley in search of larger and thicker rubber groves. A massive recruitment of labour from the Northeast was undertaken. Already devastated by a massive drought that claimed 100,000 lives, a sizable portion of the remaining population went westward in search of work. Disembarking at Belem and Manaus, the work force would be divided among employers. Each allotment would receive weapons and munitions for hunting and for protection against the indigenous tribes, clothing and simple instruments for the extractive work. Each rubber tapper would enter into service with his purchases and debts which would grow with each passing day due to manipulation by the employer. Each tapper would be shown his trail which went from tree to tree. Over a length of ten miles, around 200 trees would be found. The tapper had to cover this road twice; the first time to tap the tree and fasten the bowls to the trunks and the second time to pour this into a bucket. Work started early in the morning and by nightfall the labourer was to coagulate the latex. He could be killed anytime by members of the indigenous tribes who saw him as a poacher in his territory. The work force would die in large numbers – first due to exhaustion, then at the 179

CHAPTER 3

hands of Indians and, lastly, from beriberi, malaria and, other tropical diseases. Those who survived the harsh jungle condition and the crisis in the rubber economy would ‘caboclify’ themselves by learning to hunt with bows and arrows, working the land with wood pieces instead of hoes. Their food included turtles and alligators. Backlands Brazil Beyond the massape soil of the Northeastern coastal belt, land of a different type appears. The first part is humid broken strips of land stretching to the enormous semi-arid extension of the Caatingas or the scrubland. Beyond this, the land that penetrates into Central Brazil is the land that rises up as a plateau with open fields that spreads over thousands of kilometers. Between the Atlantic coastal forest and the Amazon jungles lies this vast midland of sparse vegetation. There exists a number of riverine forests along the banks of the main streams flowing into the midlands. But over the other areas, vegetation is poor, made up of natural grassland. In the Caatingas, the vegetation adapts itself to the dry climate where one finds only cactus, thorny bushes and xerophytic plants capable of condensing the atmospheric moisture of a cool dawn and the water of the rainy season in their tubers and fibrous leaves. In the more humid border strips of Agreste, in the drylands of Caatingas and still further uplands, developed a grazing community out of the sugar production network – the supplier of oxen, meat and leather. It was a poor and dependent economy. Over the centuries, however, the economy expanded as the internal market for its products developed and an export market for leather opened up. It finally incorporated an important chunk of the national economy and covered an immense territory. Sertao as the land is called shaped a particular population with a distinct culture. Spatially dispersed, with identifiable characteristics of the way of living, family life, clothing, entertainment, diet, and the view of the world, here the people had a strong inclination towards messianism. The cattle that arrived here originally from Cape Verde islands, were acclimatised to extensive selfbreeding. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Backlands were inhabited by Bahian and Pernambucan breeders. The herd numbered 700,000 which would double in the next century. The land that belonged to the crown was given away to those worthy of royal favours. Initially, the coastal plantation owners were the recipients of the land grant and, later, it passed on to specialised breeders. Each land grant was of immense size separated from its neighbour by days of travel. The work system of herding was based on a unique system of slavery in which payment was made by supplying the means of maintenance in salt and calves. The families of the cowman and his helpers lived at each corral. The nuclei of the people formed by the corrals planted gardens and tamed a few cows for milk and other products. The breeder and the cowmen under him had the relationship of a master and his servants. However, due to the specialized form of work of the cowmen, they had an 180


element of freedom which was not available in the plantations. For this reason, many people of mixed blood would opt for the life of the cowman with the hope that one day they would become breeders. In spite of the enormous distances between human concentrations in the corrals, some form of association formed among the members of each group resulting from rounding up of cattle running wild. Even regional festivals were organised where people would demonstrate their skills in outdoor herding activity. These were somehow tagged with the religious calendar. The harsh backland climate shaped its people and cattle. Both shrank in stature and became bony and slim. In the course of time, with the expansion of herds, the whole Sertao region would be occupied and crisscrossed by cattle through roads opened by it. They would move from one resting place to another which had water and pasturage. Thus grew villages and towns for auctioning of cattle. Poorer scrubland where cattle would not survive was given over to goats. Their number increased in no time. An export market was found for its hides. As the number of cattle and goat grew, also grew the number of people in the corrals and ranches. The ranchers then stopped paying the cowman in cattle. A monetary wage system was established. The cowman became wage earner. To supplement the income, other ancillary activities also started – the principal one being growing cotton native to the region called moco. The crop fitted well with grazing, by providing the cattle with seedcake. Every breeder wanted to be a moco grower. Then other people were brought to this land. They were sharecroppers. They received a plot of land in which they would grow food and another in which they would grow cotton. The landowner received half of the moco produced. Other ancillary activities such as exploitation of carruba palms for the manufacture of wax and artefacts of straw attracted hundreds of thousands of workers from the Northeast. In the Agreste zone, grazing was mingled with growing of food crops. Some of the surplus labour went out to neighbouring zones to cultivate rented land as sharecroppers. With further growth of population, the excess multitude formed pioneer groups who went for rubber extraction in the Amazons. Thus the Backland became a vast reservoir of cheap labour who could be enticed away for any adventurous undertaking that involved high risk. With moco and other extractive outputs declining, the condition of the poor reached a level in which the daily wage was the lowest in the world. As droughts periodically devastated the economy of the Backlands, drought victims would move to go to the cities in search of work. The anti-drought measures taken by the federal governments in the twentieth century would only enrich the lords of the Backlands – the big landowners and breeders. In the past, many backlanders resorted to banditry. This was due to the peculiar nomadic life they pursued and the culture of ‘protection’ of the ‘colonels’ by armed thugs. Since bandits negated the system of the landlords, they were looked with appreciation by the local people. Another tendency that grew in the Backlands was messianism. In 1897, a whole army had to be sent to defeat the messianic movement founded by Antonio Conselheiro who instilled in the Backland masses the hope of salvation and a better 181

CHAPTER 3

life on earth. The grim struggle of the people and the massacre resorted to by the army have been vividly described by Euclid da Cunha in his masterpiece ‘Os Sertoes’. Caipira Brazil Sao Paulo was a poverty-stricken area during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century. Devoid of any sugar plantation, the place was not even worthy of ships visiting the nearby ports. The most important town was made of houses of mud or adobe with straw roofs. The Bandeirante leaders lived here with their families away from the semiurban conclave. They were served by captive indigenous people who cultivated cassava and beans. Their language was that of the Tupi Indians. Their condition of living was the same as those of the Indians enslaved by them. However, they were bold and adventurous, always ready for any confrontation. They were more predisposed to pillage than production. Each Bandeirante leader was capable of raising hundreds of men under arms. The enemy were the hostile indigenous tribes or quilombo (runaway) blacks, unarmed or very poorly armed. The Bandeirante nuclei was attached to the external mercantile economy. Their aspiration was to amass wealth and avail the services of enslaved Indians like the Portuguese. Bandeirantes or the Sao Paulo Mamulecos were products of Portuguese fathers and indigenous mothers married through a process called cunhadismo or ‘in-lawism’ which gave a man an Indian girl as wife. As he took her on, he automatically established a thousand links of kinship with all members of the tribe. By accepting the girl, the outsider immediately had kinship with her and all her relatives. All her relatives of the parents’ generation became his parents or parents-in-law. Likewise in his own generation, where all became his brothers and sisters or brothers and sisters-in-law. All of the following generation were his children or children-in-law. With the first, he had to maintain relationship of avoidance. Open and enjoyable relationships were obtained in the case of the brothers or sisters-in-law, as well as with the generation of sons and daughters-in-law. However, the Mamulecos had lost the communitarian village life of the Portuguese, their traditional agrarian societies and food habits based on wheat, olive oil and wine. They had also lost, on the indigenous side, the autonomy of the egalitarian village, the equality of social relationship, the solidarity of the extended family and the skills in crafts. Hated by the father’s side and hating the mother’s side, these Mamulecos or half-breeds developed the peculiar Bandeirante characteristics – a nomadic martial outfit at the service of the Portuguese colonialists. These people became the terror of the free Indian tribes and the Indians of the Jesuit missions. They equally terrorised the run-away blacks. For more than a century and a half, the Bandeirantes became hunters of Indians. They would enslave them in their settlements and villages and later would sell them as slaves to sugar plantations. They depopulated huge areas. When Indians could not be found in the nearby areas, the Bandeirantes would go to hunt for them over great distances. 182


By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Bandeirantes attacked the prosperous Jesuit missions in Paraguay and captivated tens of thousands of Indians who were then transported to the sugar plants of the Northeast. Entire missions, among them the richest and the most populated, were destroyed by the Sao Paulo Mamulecos. It is estimated that around 300,000 Indians were transported to the Northeast. These adventures called for mobilization of not only all the Bandeirantes but also their trustworthy Indian tribes. Around 2000 to 3000 men under arms would be organised. One third of them would be Mamulecos – the leaders of the adventure. Men, women and children, all divided up into families, would move like a vast mobile city, settling down whenever necessary but always pushing on to attack the Indians in their redoubts. Also went along a whole retinue of auxiliaries who carried the supplies and tools, including food, and scouts who would show the way. Sao Paulo, in spite of its primitivism, was an outpost of western civilization, a slave-holding colonial enclave. The new society that grew out of indiscriminate miscegenation had a well defined hierarchical structure. It was the embryo of a new ethnicity, the Brazilian ethnicity formed out of white Portuguese, tribal Indians and later, the blacks from Africa. As an outpost in the transatlantic network of production and commerce, Sao Paulo was the supplier of Indian slaves. The civilization and urbanisation of Sao Paulo came through a process whereby people torn away from the indigenous tribes mixed with the cross-breeds of Indians and Portuguese developed as an instrument of an exogenous society which was dependent on them. The imprint of the domination, therefore, was the characteristic structure. Its economic genesis started with exportation of slaves, though within the nation. Then Gold was struck in the Sao Paulo region. First, it appeared in the Backlands of Taubate in poor veins. Then it was discovered in the prodigiously rich deposits in the hills of Minas Gerais. Its exploitation changed the Brazilian colonial society. It also thoroughly influenced the monetary pattern in Europe. It is estimated that 1,400 tons of gold and 3 million carats of diamond were exported from Brazil. These mining areas were discovered by the Sao Paulo Bandeirantes in the mountains of Minas Gerais (1698), Mato Grasso (1719) and in Goias (1725). As the news of the gold strike spread, people thronged from all over Brazil and Portugal. At its peak, around 1750 AD, 300,000 people inhabited the region. The wealthy came with all their slaves; the middle class with whatever they had and the poor with even one slave. The exploitation was initially conducted with alluvial gold which was mixed with sand and gravel from streambeds and in the river banks. Then came the turn of the gravel gold and, finally, of the mineral gold. The techniques became more and more complicated. The large influx of people and the tempo brought many social problems. There were cases: people dying of hunger or surviving on wild roots in spite of having pocketful of gold. The story of king Midas could be seen all over the place. There were conflicts on property rights among the people of various regions. Violence erupted. The War of Emboadas (or outsiders) (1710) was the most serious confrontation of this nature. 183

CHAPTER 3

The first settlers built and abandoned their settlements continuously as new veins were found. Small centres were established near the resting places where tools and utensils, salt, gunpowder, cloth and other provisions were exchanged against ounces of gold. Then came importers of slaves. The settlements turned into towns and cities. The slaves lived in the poorest huts and worked under the strict vigilance of inspectors and overseers. They were a shade freer than their brothers in the cane fields. They received a plot of land where they would grow their food. They could also purchase freedom if they were good enough to exploit the required amount of output. Many free blacks became blacksmiths in the gold region where they produced tools for extraction. The character of the population also underwent a change since many Europeans and slaves settled in the area. The new wealth forced the shift of the national capital from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. The Northeastern grazing areas along the Sao Francisco river and the west central region were integrated. The southern region villaged by the Bandeirantes raised cattle and mule for supplying to the gold region. The Gold Rush eventually integrated the whole Brazilian colonial society strewn over a vast territory. The new wealth created a vigorous social life pattern for the middle and upper classes. Majestic buildings, exquisite baroque churches and cobble stoned streets sprang up in the towns and cities. Wealthy merchants, mine owners, royal and ecclesiastical personnel were the novo-riches. The urban populace was supported by a small section of the slaves who nurtured a diversified agriculture and cattle-raising operation. However, the bulk of the slaves were engaged in production. The free blacks, mulattos and poor whites engaged themselves in auxiliary activities. Many acted as share-croppers in the lands now owned by the landowners. Sedition became evident in the upper classes as the colonial power sought to suck the maximum output for the mother country. Voices called for the end of colonial exploitation. The American War of Independence gave the inspiration to the rebels. Tiradentes, the most important figure of the anti-colonial movement (1789), was hanged. His body was quartered and displayed to instil terror among the inhabitants. After a few decades of feverish mining activities, gold somehow vanished. The whole region then submerged into decadence. Miners became small farmers. Others also followed their footsteps. In places like Minas Gerais, small industries sprang up as skilled workmen started to utilize their skill. However, such enterprises were strictly prohibited by a royal decree in 1785 – another example of colonial protectionist policy. Thereafter, agriculture became the last resort of the people. The decadence set in motion a culture of poverty. It brought back the archaic forms of living of the early pioneers. The population dispersed and settled in various suitable locations. Thus developed a rustic Caipira culture. It was a new way of life, away from the mining areas and ancillary townships. It ended up covering the whole forest area of the South Central region of Brazil. The Bandeirantes, fierce and mobile, settled down to a sedentary existence. The Caipira form of existence allowed certain freedom of activity to all sections of the population as subsistence was the whole motive of the economy. But this freedom was only momentary as another viable 184


export economy was slowly visible in large scale agricultural enterprises. Access to land was now desired by legal decree to allow these new agricultural barons to claim all land. This happened in the 1850s. After decades of great recession, by the 1840s, new forms of agro-export production took place in the Caipira land. First cotton, then tobacco and thereafter coffee began to be produced. Roads were improved. Neighbourhoods were transformed into districts. Settlements became townships. An administrative apparatus began to bind everything which was so long disperse. Above all, law enforcing agencies overseered on men, land and industry. The state appeared in the Caipira land as the agent of land-owning class. It was imperative that each Caipira placed himself under the protection of a landlord. As coffee production increased at an accelerated pace, the process of social reordering intensified. The new mode of concentration of land demanded a wageearning proletariat. Those who refused to submit themselves to this system had to move further and further into the interior. The Caipira waged a losing battle. Confined to the most sterile lands, sunk in poverty, the Caipira watched the arrivals of Italians, the Spaniards, the Germans and the Poles. They replaced the blacks, accepting a status which the Caipira had rejected. The next blow came as the remotest corners of the land were being confiscated by fair means or foul for cattle raising. These processes marginalised millions of people who served the role of contingent workers – a surplus labour force that could be mobilised by paying minimum remuneration. Coffee growing started on a small scale for local consumption. However, as it began to be exported in larger quantities, extensive areas came to be dominated by it. In 1820, 3178 sacks were exported. In 1880, it reached 5163 sacks. In economic terms, the increase was from 18.4 to 61.5 of the G.D.P. The cultivation and subsequent harvesting and exports took the Northeastern sugar plantation model at the initial stage. It called for a great expanse of land, a high degree of specialization and rationalization in the productive apparatus, a mercantile character in the export operations. It demanded rigidly disciplined work of slave labour. The financial outlay had to be enormous if the cost of land and labour in the form of slaves and machinery had to be organised. The coffee groves needed great concentration of labour in the preparatory phase of clearing up the forests. It also needed special care during the first four years. Thereafter a large number of workers were required for the harvesting season only. The initial supply of slaves was made from the declining mining industry. Slaves were also recruited from the declining cotton growing areas of Maranhao and the sugar plantations of the Northeast. In the subsequent phases, a large number of African slaves – as many as 250,000, were imported. Coffee growers, unlike sugar, dominated all sections of the coffee business which covered the whole gamut of production, processing and export. They, therefore, became a powerful economic force. Proximity to the imperial court facilitated influencing the central government immensely. With the abolition of slavery, many coffee growers had their investment vanished. Slave labour purchase constituted 36 percent of the total investment in many cases. This led to broader redistribution of income through remuneration for work by wages. 185

CHAPTER 3

This also led to abrupt substitution of owners in the coffee business. Abolition also brought in competition whereby an enthusiastic worker, through hard labour, could elevate his/her standard of living. The process also increased the number of marginal absentee groups, especially, the former slaves and the Caipiras, both mulatto and white. Newer plantations opened up in the areas around Sao Paulo. Railway lines were built for transport of people and commodities. At this juncture, European labourers were introduced, at first in small numbers. The coffee growers, due to the expansive nature of production, always faced a shortage of labour. Abolition of slavery only aggravated it. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 803,000 workers arrived from abroad, most of them Europeans. Though this induction gave a boost to coffee growing, it further alienated the blacks, white and mulatto Caipiras and others. This development paved the way for channelizing black labour to the Amazon for extraction of rubber. The coffee oligarchy, as the major political power both during the imperial and the Republican period was responsible for some of the deeply entrenched deformation of the Brazilian society. It appropriated a large chunk of the national income through a process known as ‘valorization’. It encouraged deep-rooted discrimination against the blacks and other marginalised groups. Under such circumstances, all democratic participation in the Brazilian national life was rejected. Public welfare, justice, access to land, education, rights of the working people were systematically denied. It consolidated the power of the rich and enriched them. As this policy was at the root of Brazil’s backwardness, an attitude developed among the ruling classes that involved open discontent with its own people whose black or mixed colour status was invoked to explain the backwardness. Coffee growing extended over a mobile frontier involving millions of people. From the coastal areas of Rio de Janeiro, it expanded to the west, reaching the forest areas, Espirito Santos, Minas Gerais, and, finally, Sao Paulo. It continued to the northeastern part of Parana going as far as Paraguay and even further to Mato Grasso de Sul and Rondonia. It devoured pockets inhabited by the indigenous people. It dislodged free Caipira peasants. Its rearguard was left desolate, leaving whole cities complete with churches, buildings, civil amenities lying waste while coffee growing marched on. A huge national waste! Gaucho Brazil The Bandeirantes reached and occupied the southern regions held by the Spaniards and incorporated it into the Portuguese domain. Southern Brazil is culturally heterogeneous. The region is inhabited by the Matutos or rustic farmworkers who came from the Azores; the Gauchos of the plains along the River Plate; and the Gringoes, the descendants of recent European migration. These three cultures have, of course, intermingled with each other though there is a strong tendency in each of them to hold on to their cultural roots. The Spanish Jesuits made the Christian Guarani republics flourish in the mission settlements. They made a bold experiment with the Indians by attracting them to the mission villages. They were introduced into cattle raising which satisfied their 186


hunger and induced them to devote themselves to agriculture. Thus commodities for external markets began to be produced in large quantities. This also enriched the settlements. The process detribalized the Indians who forsaking their earlier language, custom and culture became ‘generic’ Indians. The decultured Indians, concentrated in single locations, attracted the attention of the Sao Paulo Bandeirantes who were rather instigated by the Portuguese colonialists. They attacked these settlements and took possession of thousands of Indians who were eventually exported to the Northeast plantations. The area, thereafter, came under the jurisdiction of large landowners who put to vassalage the rest of the Indians. From these, a local subaltern population was created – the first Gauchos. A thorough miscegenation took place. With the mining region flourishing, opportunities arose to supply that region with various products of subsistence, including animals for transportation. Gradually, the area came under the mercantile network of Sao Paulo. As mining operations came to a halt, jerked beef production was undertaken. This new product linked this region to the Northeastern, Amazonian and Antille markets. As it is apparent, the Brazilian Gauchos came out of ethnic miscegenation of Spanish, Portuguese males with Guarani women. They were skilled in herding cattle, both domestic and wild, which proliferated prodigiously in the River Plate region. The Gauchos fed on the herd and domesticated them. The herd existed on no-one’s land and belonged to no one. Its exploitation brought in profit through trade. This also facilitated availability of European goods. The gauchos spoke Guarani and forged a Gaucho proto-ethnicity. As it has been already discussed, the first Brazilian penetration occurred in this region in the first half of the seventeenth century when the Bandeirantes attacked the Jesuit missions. Then came the Portuguese themselves. First was founded Sau Francisco (1660), then Laguna (1676) and then the colony of Sacramento (1680). Sacramento was a military outpost which facilitated Portuguese expansion. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Paulistas came in large number to settle on the region as breeders. With cattle, horses and mules were also breeded here. Breeders, therefore, recruited people accustomed to Gaucho traditions. These Gauchos, who spoke Guarani, cultivated cassava, corn and squash and made manioc flour. They also served as excellent cowherds, wranglers, ox-trainers and breeders of horses and mules. The integration of the population went on according to the grand design of the Portuguese crown for occupation and appropriation of the region. This was done in two ways. Azoreans were encouraged to settle in the coastal region where they were provided land grants. Grazing areas were established there. They were joined by Portuguese soldiers recruited in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais and moved over to Sacramento. The legal appropriation of the land helped to turn the grazing grounds to ranches. Thus Gauchos had owners to serve. The relation was that of between the master and the servant. Then the Gauchos became cowherds. Gone was their independence. Jerked beef production added another division to the class structure. As the production level had to be maintained, it was more factory like. At this point black 187

CHAPTER 3

slaves were introduced. The settlers with their workers – both free and enslaved – constituted a pre-industrial enclave. The meat packing plants introduced further regimentation. With the increase in cattle, there was an upsurge of human population. Some of these people were dislodged from the ranches. Gathering in barren lands or herded into rural slums, these Gauchos constituted the surplus labour force. They worked on odd jobs; their families grew up in poverty. They were victims of underemployment, undernourishment and infections. Many of these people worked as sharecroppers in other people’s land. They were forced to give half or more of their produce to the landowners. Today, the population of shanty towns and slums where the Gauchos live are constituted of older people and very young children. Most of the youth emigrate to the cities or other places. With industrialization, Rio Grande do Sul experienced a process of urbanisation. These urban centers are now attracting these Gauchos who end up as beggars, loafers and prostitutes. The Portuguese who came from the Azores created another historical cultural configuration. The Azoreans endeavoured to re-create here the society they came from. But the Azorean experiment was not successful. Unprepared for agricultural work in an unknown land, they were condemned to subsistence farming as there was no market for their crops. However, they soon learned the use of the land at their disposal through interaction with the local population. In time, they matured into rustic Matutos, adjusting to a way of life that was more indigenous than European. They slashed and burned the land like the Indians, they ate cassava, corn, beans and squash. They borrowed the Indian crafts. They became the Caipiras of the South. They were the main vehicle of Portuguesisation of the language of the area. Fiercely opposed to the Gauchos, though imitating much of their cultural characteristics, the Matutos helped the Portuguese monarch to integrate the land effectively. In course of time, with increasing population, as land became scarce, many Matutos became share-croppers, inflating the national reserve of the marginalised. Like the Caipiras, they also hated the wage earning system and therefore lost to the newer immigrants as capitalistic farming became the order of the day. Some, of course, worked as fishermen and coal-miners. Many were victims of tuberculosis. Infant mortality hit them hard. Thus the Matutos and the Gauchos, both the groups that were pauperised due to different reasons, fell into a culture of poverty. They lived in shacks. Illiterates in a society that was slowly integrating itself into a literate system of communication, these people gradually lost their folkloric traditions. A cultural homogenization brought through poverty unified these diverse groups as authentic proto-Brazilians. The third configuration of the region was made up of proto-Brazilians of descendants from German, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Lebanese, and other ethnic groups who migrated to Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century. These groups, recently integrated, were distinguished by their bilingualism, and a rural way of life founded on agricultural small properties and a higher educational level than the rest of the population. 188


European settlement, which was an imperial policy, was characterised by an attitude that made the rulers look down upon their own people as somewhat imperfect. The elites blamed the national backwardness on the ‘racial inferiority’ to which they were submerged. A radical replacement by eugenically better ones was conceived as a way out. The Imperial Government spent a large sum of money for transport and settlement of a large number of people from Central Europe. Liberal land grants were awarded to them. Though a sizable section of their own population was submerged in poverty, the new immigrants were treated with utmost courtesy. The newcomers, commonly called Gringoes, occupied a vast area in the state of Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. These people showed greater resilience in their way of life and culture, though the various ethnic groups maintained their isolation from each other. Their social uniformity was due to the size of their land holdings and their professional skills. The succeeding generations had a more satisfying life. However, with progress of time, they also faced a similar process of marginalisation and pauperisation – though not in entirety. BRAZIL: THE EDUCATIONAL SCENARIO7 I

Brazil is the largest Latin American country. It is even larger than the United States minus Alaska. This is a country of extreme wealth and poverty, of humid jungles and dry plains, of sizeable mountains and long coastal lines. Brazil has produced a variegated society with a variegated educational system. In this country one can find the most modern schools and universities situated in the modern, urban parts of the country. Side by side, there exist the poorest schools and the greatest degree of illiteracy in some of the poorest areas on earth. Occupying half of Latin America, Brazil touches all the countries of the continent except Chile and Ecuador. The climatic conditions in such a huge land mass is varied too. Amazonia is hot and humid the year round. The Northeast is generally characterised by dry heat. Then there is the polygon of drought where it rains only during three months of the year. In Goias, Minas Gerais, Espirito Santos, Rio de Janeiro, and in larger parts of Sao Paulo, there are extensive areas of moderate climate. The region in which Brasilia is situated has the most agreeable climate. Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul have the good fortune to experience all the four seasons. One of the educational consequences of this geography calls for a flexible structure to deal with a population living in widely diversified conditions. The primary schools and primary teachers’ training colleges are controlled by the states. The secondary schools and institutions of higher learning are subjected to Federal laws. The Basic Education law of 1961 aimed at greater decentralization. A look at the climatic conditions of Brazil reveals that only a decentralized educational structure could make schooling effective. In the northern region, which includes the states of Amazonas, Acre, and Para and the territories of Rondonia, 189

CHAPTER 3

Rio Branco and Amapra, schools cannot function from January to May due to intense rains. In the rural areas it is practically impossible for a child to go to school situated at a distance of more than one kilometer. In November and December, the heat is so intense that schools cannot function. Out of the entire year, only five months have favourable climatic condition for school work. In the Northeast, with long dry periods from September to January, the countryside is practically without any activity. Food and water are scarce. In this region the rivers are not navigable and school activities can be effectively conducted during the rest seven months. II

In 1586, the society of Jesus resolved to define its educational goals. It hoped to educate the priests as well as the lay leaders of Catholicism by means of secondary and adult education. The plans were incorporated in Ratio Studiorum. The schools founded by the Jesuits to educate the native population were then transformed into colleges for instruction in the liberal arts. They had institutions for clergymen. These were now opened to the general public. The Jesuit colleges were the only institutions in Brazil during the early period of the colonial rule. They provided basic education to the Brazilian leaders. Even after their disappearance, these early institutions served as models to the first secondary schools in Brazil. In the big houses, a kind of primary school for teaching white and mestizo children was established. The priests who were born in the big houses often returned as chaplain. In the middle of the Eighteenth century, the Jesuits had seventeen colleges and seminaries. Those at Rio de Janeiro and Bahia had complete courses in the humanities, philosophy, theology and religious sciences. In 1759, the Marques de Pombal, prime minister of Portugal, decided to expel the Jesuits from Portugal and its colonies. With the Jesuits expelled, the Marques tried to organise an educational system designed to reach a substantial part of the population – both in the mother country and in the colonies, including Brazil. He introduced a tax to finance education. Pombal initially thought of secular teachers to implement his grand design of educating the masses. It was supplemented in 1774 by the teaching of Franciscan monks who established a number of schools in Brazil. However, all these efforts were confined to educating the upper strata of the population only. During 1798–1800, the Seminario de Olinda was created by Bishop Azaravedo Coutinho. This seminary located on the hill on the north of the city of Recife, taught Greek, French, history, geography, physics, national history, poetry, philosophy and theology. It was the first broad educational institution in colonial Brazil. III

King Joao established the royal press in 1808 and started publishing the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro. The first library was established in 1810. It had a collection of 190


60,000 volumes. The Naval Academy was established in 1808 and the Military Academy in 1810. Courses in surgery, anatomy and medicine were introduced in Rio de Janerio and Bahia between 1809 and 1813. A chair for teaching Economics was founded in Bahia in 1808, Chemistry in 1817 and Technical Designing in 1818. The Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Professions was founded in 1816. The literacy rate among the free adults was ten percent at this time. After the proclamation of independence on September 7, 1822, the government sought to introduce free education for the people. During the imperial period the rate of illiteracy was never less than 85%. From 1823 onwards, an attempt was made to solve the problem of mass education. Experiments were carried out with the monitoring system of Lancaster. With the help of this system, a single teacher could teach many students in a single classroom assisted by advanced students acting as monitors. The Law of October 20, 1823, proclaimed the principle of freedom of instruction without any restriction. Clause 23 of Article 179 of the Constitution promulgated on December 11, 1823, guaranteed free primary school education for all children. The Law of October 15, 1827, provided for the establishment of primary schools in all cities, towns and villages both for boys and girls. The Law of August 11, 1827, provided for two courses in Law: one at the convent of San Francisco in Sao Paulo launched on March 1, 1828 and the other at the Monastery of Sao Benito in Olinda inaugurated on March 15 of the same year. Clause 2 of the Article 10 of the amendment of the Constitution, promulgated in 1834, decentralized the organisation and administration of elementary and secondary education, turning it over to the competence of the provinces, so that only higher education and schools in the neutral municipality (Rio de Janeiro) remained within the jurisdiction of the national government. According to the account written by Diego de Mendonsa, director of education of Sao Paulo in 1872, the programme of compulsory education met with great difficulty. Difficulties of travel and transport hindered its development in the rural areas. In Sao Paulo’s population of 700,000 the school enrolment was not above 11,160 during the period and actual attendance did not exceed 8,688. Several types of secondary schools were established – some with public, others with private support. A bachelor’s degree was awarded by the Colegio at the conclusion of the course. One of the most interesting accomplishments of the empire was the founding in 1837 of the Colegio Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro. Maintained by the national government, this school eventually became the official model for secondary schools throughout the country. The students received the degree of Bachelor of Letters after seven years of study. The Lazarist fathers established a famous institution – Colegio Caraca in 1820. In 1845, the Jesuits founded Colegio de Nossa Senhora do Desterro. In 1867 they organised Colegio San Luis at Itu (Sao Paulo). Also worthy of mention were the college and seminary at Pernambuco, founded by the Jesuits; The Liceu Paraibano 191

CHAPTER 3

(1842) and Colegio Brandao in Cajazeiras (1866), both in Paraiba; the Ginasio Biano and Colegio Meneses Vieira in Rio de Janeiro. Almost all the provinces had at least one Colegio which expanded into a Law School, medical school or other institutions of higher learning. Attempts were made to develop instruction in technology, agriculture, commerce and industry. But most of these failed. By 1864, not more than 150 students were enrolled in the technical and commercial schools in Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco and Para, while Colegios had an enrolment of around 8000 students. The two Law Schools enrolled 800 students. The first normal School was opened in Niteroj in 1835, and other such schools were opened in Bahia in 1836, in Ceara in 1845 and in Sao Paulo in 1846. In 1869, there were 3,561 public schools with a total enrolment of 115,735 students (1.2% of the population). In 1876, there were 6,000 public schools attended by 200,000 pupils. In 1889, the number of schools increased to 7,500 with 300,000 student enrolment (2.1% of the population). The population in Brazil in 1889 was estimated at 14 million. For each group of 10,000 inhabitants, there were 214 pupils in the primary, 7 in the secondary and 1.6 in the advanced schools. Less than 3% of the population were attending any school. The first head of the federal administration of education was Benjamin Constant, one of the founding fathers of the Republic. He encouraged education in science and technology. Sao Paulo was the first state to deal seriously and systematically with the problem of public primary education and teachers’ training for that purpose. The state was divided into school districts under the supervision of inspectors. The primary education was organised in two stages: a primary school of four years and a supplementary school of three years. The smaller communities offered only the four-year course. Sao Paulo was the model for the whole country. It followed the Herbart model which was then in vogue in the U.S.A. The alternative French version of European pedagogy based on Pestalozzi and Froebel and reinforced by Binet, Decroly and Montessory was followed elsewhere. The social, political and economic changes that took place by 1930 had their educational counterparts too. One of the ablest young educators, Lourenco Filho was appointed by the state government of Ceara, to organise and develop a system of elementary education and teacher training programme. Among the leaders of the new movement for education was Anisio Teixeira who was outstanding as a trend-setter. At the age of twenty-four, this law graduate was put in charge of schools in Bahia. He travelled to Europe and the U.S.A to study the systems there. He studied with John Dewey. Thereafter, he applied the principles of Dewey in Brazil. From 1937 onwards, greater emphasis was placed on eradication of illiteracy. The three-year supplementary course was virtually abandoned. Four-year primary schools of the cities was reduced to three-years in the rural areas. Students were taught reading, writing and arithmetic. The system of education that developed in the first half of the 20th Century took the French system as the model. 192


During the year 1958, enrolment in primary schools stood at 5,802,000. Children in the age-group of 8–11 numbered approximately 6,200,000. It means that theoretically 94% the children in the above-mentioned age-group were in schools. However the situation was much more complicated. Some children, numbering 5 to 10% never attended any school. A great many children attended for a year or so. Others attended the primary school for 5 to 7 years. The maximum enrolment was in the 8–11 age-group. Of those enrolled, 47% of the children were in the first grade and only 10% in the fourth grade. 1,280,000 boys and girls became 7 years’ old in 1945. During that year 1,204,000 children entered school for the first time. 76,000 or 6% did not enter any school. Of those who began school that year, 104,000 did not stay through the year. 1,100,000 finished the first year at school, though many did not pass. Some of these could not pass even after four years or more. About 26% finished the fourth year at school, though less than 20% actually passed the fourth grade. In 1940, the median child stayed in the school only for two years. In 1950, the same child stayed for three years. 37% finished the fourth year at a school. In 1960, around 50% finished the fourth year at school. IV

Since the 1950 census which revealed that half of the adult population was illiterate, Brazil committed itself to eradication of illiteracy. The first major campaign was mounted in 1947. Appeals were made to various community organisations to start schools for adults with the promise that the Ministry of Education would provide teaching materials and technical advice. Eventually, around 17,200 evening schools were organised. Slide projectors and film strips were distributed together with simple reading materials. A critical evaluation in 1957 revealed that the campaign had gradually lost much of its drive. The programme was then reorganised with emphasis on communities with 5,000 people or more. Between 1956 and 1960, 113,000 people were taught at an average the techniques of reading and writing. Roman Catholic bishops also started their own programme of adult education. Each new president started his own campaign against illiteracy. President Janio Quadros, only a week before resigning, ceremonially launched National Mobilization against Illiteracy. Five years ago Kubitschek had started a similar programme. EDUCATION AS THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM: TEXT AND CONTEXT

1. Society in Transition To be human is to engage in relationship with others and with the world.8 With these words Paulo Freire commences his journey in the world. He says, ‘It is to experience that world, as an objective reality and independent of oneself, capable of being known’.9 How does one differentiate a human from an animal? ‘Animals, submerged within reality and cannot relate to it; they are creatures of mere contacts’. But the human’s separateness from and openness to the world distinguishes it as a 193

CHAPTER 3

being of relationships. Humans, unlike animals, are not only in the world but with the world.10 Humans relate to the world in a critical way, asserts Freire.11 They act through reflection – and not by reflex, as do animals.12 And thus a new discovery is made – that of temporality. Transcending a single dimension, they reach back to yesterday, recognize today and come upon tomorrow. The dimensionality of time is one of the fundamental discoveries in the history of human culture, asserts Freire.13 In illiterate cultures, he continues, the “weight” of apparently limitless time hindered people from reaching that consciousness of temporality and thereby achieving a sense of their historical nature.14 As humans emerge from time, discover temporality and free themselves from “today”, their relations with the world become impregnated with consequence.15 And now Freire charts out the role of humans in the world. ‘Humans can intervene in reality in order to change it’. Inheriting acquired experience, creating and recreating, integrating themselves into their context, responding to its challenges, objectifying themselves, discerning, transcending, humans enter into the domain which is theirs exclusively– that of history and of culture.16 Integration with one’s context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity.17 The integrated person is a subject. In contrast, the adaptive person is an object. Adaptation, according to Freire, is the behavioral characteristic of animal world. When humans do it, it is symptomatic of dehumanization.18 (It is to be noted that he will change his view with time, as he has done in Pedagogy of Hope.) Throughout history humans have attempted to overcome the factors which make them accommodate or adjust, in a struggle – constantly threatened by oppression – to attain their full humanity.19 As humans relate to the world by responding to the challenges of the environment, they begin to dynamize, to master and to humanize reality.20 As they create, recreate and decide, historical epochs begin to take shape. And it is by creating, recreating and deciding that humans should participate in these epochs.21 An historical epoch, argues Freire, is characterised by a series of aspirations, concerns and values in search of fulfillment; by ways of being and behaving; by more or less generalised attitudes. The concrete representations of many of these aspirations, concerns and values, as well as obstacles to their fulfillment constitute the themes of that epoch, which in turn indicate the tasks to be carried out. The epochs are fulfilled to the degree that their themes are grasped and their tasks solved; and they are superseded when their themes and tasks no longer correspond to newly emerging concerns.22 This is the crux of his social theory which he would later utilize in his concept of coding and decoding. Humans play a crucial role in the fulfillment and in the overruling of the epochs. And now Freire gives his opinion about the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the themes thus given. Whether or not humans can perceive the epochal themes and above all how they act upon the reality within which themes are generated will largely determine their humanization or dehumnization, their affirmation as Subjects or their reduction as objects. For only as humans grasp the themes can they intervene in reality instead of remaining mere onlookers. And only by developing 194


a permanently critical attitude can humans overcome a posture of adjustment in order to become integrated with the spirit of the time.23 Unfortunately, what happens to a greater or lesser degree in the various “worlds” into which the world is divided is that the ordinary person is crushed, diminished, converted into a spectator, maneuvered by myths which powerful social forces have created. These myths turn against the person and destroy and annihilate him/her. Tragically frightened, people fear authentic relationships and even doubt the possibility of their existence. On the other hand, fearing solitude, they gather in groups lacking in any critical and loving ties which might transform them into a cooperating unit, into a true community.24 A brilliant presentation of the inauthentic existence in a ‘selfish’ world. In a spirit reminiscent of Heidegger’s inauthentic Dasein, Freire claims that the greatest tragedy of a modern individual is his/her domination by the force of these myths and manipulation by organised advertising, ideological or otherwise. Gradually, without even realizing the loss, the individual relinquishes his/her capacity for the (Sartrian) choice; he/she is expelled from the orbit of decisions. Ordinary persons do not perceive the tasks of the time; the latter are interpreted by an “elite” and presented in the form of recipes, of prescriptions. And when people try to save themselves by following the prescriptions, they drown in levelling anonymity, without hope and without faith, domesticated and adjusted.25 How seamlessly Freire incorporates post-First World War Germany with the developing world after the Second World War! If individuals are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time, and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in the wake of change, claims Freire.26 They see that the times are changing, but they are submerged in that change and so cannot discern its dramatic significance. And a society beginning to move from one epoch to another requires the development of an especially flexible, critical spirit. Lacking such a spirit, people cannot perceive the marked contradictions which occur in society as emerging values in search of affirmation and fulfillment clash with earlier values seeking self-preservation.27 The shock between a yesterday which is losing relevance but still seeking to survive, and a tomorrow which is gaining substance characterises the phase of transition as a time of announcement and a time of decision. Only, however, to the degree that the choices result from a critical perception of the contradictions are they real and capable of being transformed in action. Choice is illusory to the degree it represents the expectation of others.28 Thus Freire distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic choice. Looking at reality from the vantage point of post-coup Brazil, where change in the objective condition did not bring hope but despair, Freire asserts, while all transition involves change, not all change results in transition. Changes can occur within a single historical epoch that do not profoundly affect it in any way. There is a normal interplay of social readjustments resulting from the search for fulfillment of the themes. However, when these themes begin to lose their substance and significance and new themes emerge, it is a sign that society is beginning to move into a new epoch. The time of transition involves a rapid movement in search of 195

CHAPTER 3

new themes and new tasks. In such a phase the individual needs more than ever to be integrated with his/her reality. If she/he lacks the capacity to perceive the “mystery” of the changes, she/he will be a mere pawn at their mercy.29 Brazil, in the 1950s and early 1960s, was precisely in this position of moving from one epoch to another, says Freire. Which were the themes and the tasks which had lost and were losing their substance in Brazilian society? All those characteristics of a “closed society”. For instance, continues Freire, Brazil’s non-autonomous status had generated the theme of cultural alienation. Elite and masses alike lacked integration with the Brazilian reality. The elite lived “superimposed” upon that reality; the people submerged within it. To the elite fell the task of importing alien cultural models; to the people, the task of following, of being under, of being ruled by the elite, of having no task of their own.30 The characteristically Freirean individual, who maintains a relationship with the world, who recognizes time as a dimension of existence, who instead of adapting, integrates with one’s context, who, humanizes reality, who critically grasping the themes, intervenes in reality as a Subject and not as an object or a mere onlooker now confronts the Brazilian reality of the 1950s and 60s to be precise – a society split vertically between an elite ‘superimposed’ upon the reality and the people ‘submerged’ within it. If Brazil was to move surely toward becoming a homogeneously open society, the correct perception of new inspirations and a new perception of old themes were essential. In that transitional phase, education became a highly important task. Its potential force would depend, above all, upon the capacity to participate in the dynamism of the transitional epoch. It would depend upon distinguishing clearly which elements truly belonged to the transition and which were simply present in it. As the link between one epoch in exhaustion and another gaining substance, the transition had aspects of prolonging and conserving the old society at the same time that it extended forward into the new society. The new perceptions did not prevail easily or without sacrifice; the old themes had to exhaust their validity before they could give way to the new. Thus the dynamics of transition involved flux and reflux, advances and retreats. And those who lacked the ability to perceive the mystery of the times responded to each retreat with a tragic hopelessness and generalised fear.31 The starting point for the Brazilian transition was that closed society – one whose raw material export economy was determined by an external market, whose very center of economic decision was located abroad – a “reflex”, “object” society, lacking a sense of nationhood. Backward, illiterate, anti-dialogical and elitist.32 Readers will observe that this theme has later been developed by Freire in his Harvard booklets contained in Cultural Action for Freedom. There he provided the cultural counterpart to Andre Gunder Frank’s thesis on development of underdevelopment which Frank termed as a metropolis-satellite structure. The society split apart with the rupture of the forces which had kept it in equilibrium. The economic changes which began in the nineteenth century with industrialization, and which increased in the twentieth century, were instrumental in this cleavage. Brazil was a society in the 1950s and 1960s, no longer totally closed but not yet truly open: a society in the process of opening. The urban 196


centres had become predominantly open, while the rural areas remained predominantly closed.33 The democratic salvation of Brazil would lie, argues Freire, in making this society homogeneously open. The challenge of achieving that openness was taken up by various contradictory forces – both external and internal. Some groups truly believed that the increasing political participation of the people during the transitional epoch would make it possible to achieve an open autonomous society without violence. Other, reactionary, forces sought at all costs to obstruct any advance and to maintain the status-quo indefinitely. The deepening of the clash encouraged a tendency to choose one side or the other. The emotional climate of the time encouraged the tendency to become radical about the choice. Thus Freire analyses the situation in the transitional phase. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, says Freire. It is predominantly critical, loving, humble, and communicative and therefore a positive stance. The person who has made a radical option does not deny another person’s right to choose nor does he/she try to impose his/her own choice. He/she can discuss his/her respective position. He/she is convinced that he/she is right but respects another person’s prerogative to judge himself/herself correct. He/she tries to convince and convert, not crush his/her opponent. The radical does, however, have the duty, imposed by love itself, to react against the violence of those who try to silence him/her – of those who in the name of freedom kill his/her freedom and their own. To be radical does not imply self-flagellation. Radicals cannot passively accept a situation in which the excessive power of a few leads to the dehumanization of all.34 This is Paulo Freire’s definition of radicalism: a truly democratic character who is convinced of his/her position but respects the position of others. In an analysis of what went wrong during the period of transition – a period which was utilized by the reactionary forces to use the mass media and all other organs at the disposal of these forces to generate public opinion against the forces of change, Paulo Freire says, ‘Unfortunately, the Brazilian people, elite and masses alike, were generally unprepared to evaluate the transition critically; and so, tossed about by the force of the contending contradictions, they began to fall into sectarian positions instead of opting for radial solutions. Sectarianism is predominantly emotional and uncritical. It is arrogant, antidialogical and thus anticommunicative. It is a reactionary stance, whether on the part of a rightist… or a leftist. The sectarian creates nothing because he/she cannot love. Disrespecting the choices of others, he tries to impose his own choice on everyone else’.35 The radical is a Subject to the degree that he/she perceives historical contradictions in increasingly critical fashions; however, he/she does not consider himself/ herself the proprietor of history. And while he/she recognizes that it is impossible to stop or to anticipate history without penalty, he/she is no mere spectator of the historical process. On the contrary, he/she knows that as a subject he/she can and ought, together with other Subjects, to participate creatively in that process by discerning transformation in order to aid and accelerate them.36 In the Brazilian transition, it was the sectarians, especially those of the right, who predominated, rather then the radicals, says Freire. And fanaticism flourished, 197

CHAPTER 3

fanned by the irrational climate arising as the contradictions in society deepened. This fanaticism which separated and brutalised people, created hatred, thus threatening the essential promises of the transition – the humanization of the Brazilian people and their extraordinary sense of hope, hope rooted in the passage of the Brazilian society from its previous colonial, reflex status to that of a Subject.37 In alienated societies, explains Freire, people oscillate between ingenuous optimism and hopelessness. Incapable of autonomous projects, they seek to transplant from other cultures solutions to their problems. But since these borrowed solutions are neither generated by a critical analysis of the context itself, nor adequately adapted to the context, they prove inoperative and unfruitful. Finally, the older generations give in to disheartenment and feelings of inferiority. But at some point in the historical process of these societies, new facts occur which provoke the first attempts at self-awareness, whereupon a new cultural climate begins to form. Some previously alienated intellectual groups begin to integrate themselves with their cultural reality. Entering the world they perceive the old themes anew and grasp the tasks of their time. Bit by bit, these groups begin to see themselves and their society from their own perspective; they become aware of their own potentialities. This is the point at which hopelessness begins to be replaced by hope. Thus, nascent hope coincides with an increasingly critical perception of the concrete conditions of reality. Society now reveals itself as something unfinished, not as something inexorably given; it has become a challenge rather than a hopeless limitation.38 This whole process will be observed in the Brazilian development of art and literature where, instead of European themes and contexts, Brazilian themes and contexts created great works of literature. It is also seen in the economic and political movements of the 1950s and 1960s when Brazilians wanted to finish their own unfinished task. ‘.....The climate of hope is adversely affected by the impact of sectarianism’, says Freire, ‘which arises as the split in the closed society leads to the phenomenon Mannheim has called “fundamental democratization”. This democratisation, opening like a fan into interdependent dimensions (economic, social, political and cultural), characterised the unprecedented participating presence of the Brazilian people in the phase of transition. During the phase of the closed society, the people are submerged in reality. As that society breaks open, they emerge. No longer mere spectators, they uncross their arms, renounce expectancy, and demand intervention. No longer satisfied to watch, they want to participate’.39 Paulo Freire very eloquently explains what happened in Brazil in the 1960s, before the military coup. He goes on further, ‘This participation disturbs the privileged elite, who band together in self-defence. At first, the elite react spontaneously. Later, perceiving more clearly the threat involved in the awakening of popular consciousness, they organise. They bring forth a group of “crisis theoreticians” (the new cultural climate is usually labelled a crisis); they create social assistance institutions and armies of social workers; and in the name of supposedly threatened freedom– they repel the participation of the people’.40 Freire further adds, ‘The elite defend a sui generis democracy, in which the people are “unwell” and require “medicine” – whereas in fact, their “ailment” is the wish to speak up and participate’.41 198


During the Brazilian transition, comments Freire, as the popular classes renounced a position of accommodation and claimed their right to participate actively in the historical process, reactionary groups saw clearly the resulting threat to their interests. To end this uncomfortable quandary, they needed – in addition to the power they already possessed – the government, which at least in part, they did not possess. Eventually a coup d’etat was to solve that problem’.42 Freire analyses the military coup and its effect. He says, retreats do not deter the transition. They do not constitute backward movement or distort it. The new themes (or new perceptions of old themes) which are repressed during the retreats will persist in their advance until such time as the validity of the old themes is exhausted and new ones reach fulfillment. Freire provides an interpretation of what circumstances led to the coup in 1964. He says, ‘In such an historical-cultural climate, it is virtually impossible for intensely emotional forces not to be unleashed’.43 ‘Brazilian people’, he says in this context, ‘...had only just begun to become a true “people”’. He further adds, ‘Misunderstood and caught in the middle (though they were not centrists) were the radicals, who wanted solutions to be found with the people, not for them or superimposed upon them’.44 These radicals, and we have no doubt that Freire considered himself as one, rejected the palliatives of “assistentialism” (a term used in Latin America to describe policies of financial or social assistance which attack symptoms, but not causes, of social ills), the force of decrees and the irrational fanaticism of “crusades”, instead of defending basic transformations in society...’.45 Now Freire brings forth the concept of ‘critical consciousness’. He says, “Assistentialism” is an especially pernicious method of trying to vitiate popular participation in the historical process. It contradicts the process of “fundamental democratization”. The greatest danger of assistentialism is the violence of antidialogue, which by imposing silence and passivity denies men/women conditions likely to develop or to “open” their consciousness. For without an increasingly critical consciousness men/women are not able to integrate themselves into a transitional society, marked by intense change and contradiction. Assistentialism is thus both an effect and a cause of massification. Readers may please note the word ‘massification’. Freire will use this term to use a novel concept. The stage of critical consciousness that Freire has introduced is preceded by some other forms of consciousness. ‘Men/women submerged in the historical process’ says Freire, ‘are characterised by a state I have described as “semi-transitivity of consciousness”. It is the consciousness of men/women belonging to what Fernando de Azevedo has called “circumscribed” and “introverted” communities, the consciousness which prevailed in the closed Brazilian society...’.46 Defining those having this kind of consciousness, Freire says that ‘men/women of semi-transitive consciousness cannot apprehend problems situated outside their sphere of biological necessity. Their interests center almost totally around survival, and they lack a sense of life on a more historic plane’.47 As men/women amplify their power to perceive and respond to suggestions and questions arising in their context, and increase their capacity to enter into dialogue not only with other men/women but with their world, they become “transitive”, 199

CHAPTER 3

says Freire.48 One can well understand what Freire means. But he must have identified groups of people who could be thus characterised. During the movement in the 1960s, people were gradually becoming conscious of their rights as they organised in the cities and villages. Freire clarifies: ‘Transitivity of consciousness makes man/woman “permeable”. It leads him/her to replace his/her disengagement from existence with almost total engagement. Existence is a dynamic concept, implying an eternal dialogue between humans and the world, between humans and their creator. It is this dialogue which makes of human being an historical being’.49 One can sense a Sartrian influence here as suggested by the use of the word ‘engagement’. Freire invents another intermediate stage. He says, ‘There is however, an initial, predominantly naive, stage of transitive consciousness. Naive transitivity, the state of consciousness which predominated in Brazilian urban centers during the transitional period, is characterized by an oversimplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by underestimation of the common man/woman; by a strong tendency to gregariousness; by a lack of interest in investigation, accompanied by an accentuated taste for fanciful explanations; by fragility of argument; by a strongly emotional style; by the practice of polemics rather than dialogue; by magical explanations. ....Naive transitivity is the consciousness of men/women who are still almost part of a mass, in whom the developing capacity for dialogue is still fragile and capable of distortion’.50 As already indicated, Freire must have pointed at some concrete section of the Brazilian urban population. ‘The critically transitive consciousness’, says Freire, ‘is characterised by depth in the interpretation of problems; by the substitution of causal principles for magical explanations; by the “testing” of one’s findings and by openness to revision; by the attempt to avoid distortion when perceiving problems and to avoid preconceived notions when analysing them; by refusing to transfer responsibility; by rejecting passive positions; by soundness of argumentation; by the practice of dialogue, rather than polemics; by receptivity to the new for reasons beyond mere novelty; and by the good sense not to reject the old just because it is old – by accepting what is valid in both old and new. Critical transitivity is characteristic of authentically democratic regimes and corresponds to highly permeable, interrogative, restless, and dialogical forms of life – in contrast to silence and inaction, in contrast to the rigid, military authoritarian state...’51 There are certain positions, attitudes and gestures associated with the awakening of critical awareness, which occur naturally due to economic progress, asserts Freire. These should not be confused with an authentically critical position, which a person must make his own by intervention in and integration with his/her own context. Conscientizacao represents the development of the awakening of critical awareness. It will not appear as a natural by-product of even major economic changes but must grow out of a critical educational effort based on favourable historical conditions.52 Closed Society and Democratic Experience To understand the Brazilian transition, one has to look at the closed, colonial, slavocratic, reflex, anti-democratic society that Brazil inherits, asserts Freire. 200


The most important characteristic of this inheritance is the lack of democratic experience of the Brazilian people. In fact, Brazil developed under conditions which were hostile to the acquisition of democratic experience, with head bowed, in fear of the crown, without a press, foreign relations, schools or a voice of their own. It’s colonization, strongly predatory, was based on economic exploitation of the large landholding and on slave labour.53 Elaborating the features of colonialism, Freire points out: 1. The first colonizers of Brazil lacked a sense of integration with the colony. 2. Immense tracts of land were granted to a single person who took possession as well of the men and women who came to live and work there. On these widely separated holdings, the inhabitants had no alternative but to become proteges of their all powerful masters. These conditions bred the habits of domination and dependence. 3. The enormous size of the estates, the small population of the mother country which hindered attempts at settlement, the commercial spirit of colonization all led to the institution of slavery. 4. The excess of power created, on one hand, an almost masochistic desire to submit to that power and on the other a desire to be all powerful. This led people to adapt and adjust to their circumstances instead of seeking to integrate themselves with reality.54 The social distance characteristic of human relationships on the great estate did not permit a dialogue. Without a dialogue self-government cannot exist; hence selfgovernment was almost unknown among the Brazilians. The center of gravity in Brazilian private and public life was located in external power and authority. Men and women were crushed by the power of the landlords, the governors, the captains, the viceroys. Introjecting this external authority, the people developed a consciousness which “housed” oppression, rather than the free and creative consciousness indispensable to authentically democratic regimes.55 The colonial municipal councils and senates afforded some opportunity for democratic experience, observes Freire. But the people did not participate in these assemblies. A privileged class governed the municipalities: the so-called gentlemen. Common men and women were excluded from the elective process and forbidden to shape the fate of their communities.56 In 1808 Dom Joao VI of Portugal arrived in Rio de Janeiro where he installed himself with all his court members. This provoked profound changes in Brazilian life. It afforded – at least to free men and women – new possibilities for experiences in democracy. A series of reforms followed. The court encouraged urban industry and activity and established schools, press, libraries and technical education. The cities grew in power as the rural nobility declined.57 The transfer of power to the cities, however, did not ensure participation by the common folk in the life of the community. The strength of the cities lay in the opulent bourgeoisie which had prospered in commerce. Later that strength would lie in the ideas of the University graduates – of rural origin but true urbanites who had studied in Europe.58 201

CHAPTER 3

Accompanying the surge of reforms and changes and in opposition to the tenuous possibilities of democratisation, which might have arisen with city-life, Brazil was subjected to re-Europeanisation together with a series of anti-democratic procedures which reinforced its lack of democratic experience. Until the split in Brazilian society offered the first conditions for popular participation, precisely the opposite situation prevailed: popular alienation, silence, and inaction. With a few exceptions, the people remained at the margin of historical events or were led to those events demagogically. Then, finally, major economic changes began to affect the system of forces which had kept the closed society in equilibrium; with the end of that equilibrium, the society split open and entered the phase of transition. The first of these changes occurred towards the end of the last century. Following restrictions on the slave trade in 1850 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, capital intended for the purpose of slaves suddenly found itself without application. Little by little, this capital was employed in incipient industrial activities and led to the first attempts at internal economic growth. Further, the government policy of encouraging immigration to replace slave labour greatly stimulated Brazil’s development. Beginning in the 1920s and increasingly after the Second World War, Brazilian industrialization received the strongest impulse. These changes affected profoundly the entire life of the nation. Culture, the arts, literature, and science showed new tendencies towards research, identification with the Brazilian reality and the planning of solutions rather than importation. The Superintendency of Development of the North-East (SUDENE), directed by the economist Celso Furtado before the military coup, was an example of such planning. The people emerged and began to participate in the historical process.59 Education versus Massification Economic development, asserts Freire, acts as a support for democracy during the transitional phase. This does away with the oppressive power of the rich over the poor. This development essentially is of national origin and not a borrowed one.60 The special contribution of education to the birth of the new society cannot be overemphasised, observes Freire. It is critical education which forms critical attitudes. Only an education facilitating the passage from the naive to critical transitivity, increasing the people’s ability to perceive the challenges of their time, could prepare the people to resist the emotional power of the transition.61 The education that the Brazilian situation demanded would enable people to discuss courageously the problems of their context and to intervene in that context. It would warn people of the dangers of the time and offer them the confidence and the strength to confront these dangers instead of surrendering their sense of self through submission to the decisions of others. By predisposing people to re-evaluate constantly, to analyze findings, to adopt scientific methods and processes and to perceive themselves in a dialectical relationship with their social reality, that education could help people to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it.62 202


Certainly, Freire asserts, the mere process of technological modernization to lead the people from the naive to critical consciousness could not be relied upon. Indeed, Freire opines, an analysis of highly technological societies usually reveals the ‘domestication’ of people’s critical faculties by a situation in which they are massified. The new education would have to offer people the means to resist the ‘uprooting’ tendencies of the industrial civilization which accompany its capacity to improve living standards. The solution to this problem of ‘domestication’ and development of critical consciousness does not lie in rejection of the machine, but rather in the humanization of the human being.63 Freire addressed the views of some who questioned the validity of industrialization itself. Freire was convinced that the Brazilian people could learn social and political responsibility only by experiencing that responsibility, through intervention in the destiny of their children’s schools, in the destinies of their trade unions and places of employment through associations, clubs and councils, and in the life of their neighbourhoods, churches and rural communities by actively participating in associations, clubs and charitable societies. The people could be helped to learn democracy through the exercise of democracy; for that knowledge, above all others, can only be assimilated experientially. More often than not, it has been attempted to transfer that knowledge to the people verbally, as if we could give lessons in democracy while regarding popular participation in the exercise of power as ‘absurd and immoral’. Freire emphasizes that the Brazilians lacked and needed sufficient courage to discuss with the common people his/her right to that participation. Nothing threatened the correct development of popular emergence more than an educational practice which failed to offer opportunities for the analysis of and debate on problems, or for genuine participation; one which not only did not identify with the trend toward democratisation but reinforced the Brazilians’ lack of democratic experience. Therefore, according to Freire, the Brazilians needed an education which would lead people to take a new stance toward their problems – that of intimacy with those problems, one oriented towards research instead of repeating irrelevant principles. An education of ‘I wonder’ instead of merely ‘I do’. Vitality, instead of insistence on the transmission of inert ideas. The Brazilian education system lacked theory – theory of intervention in reality, the analytical contact with existence which enables one to substantiate and to experience that existence fully and completely. It was the climate of transition which had finally led the Brazilians to identify with their reality in a systematic way. Democracy and democratic education are founded on faith in people, on the belief that they not only can but should discuss the problems of their country, of their continent, their world, their work, the problems of democracy itself. Education is an act of love and thus an act of courage. It cannot fear the analysis of reality or under pain of revealing itself as a force, avoid creative discussion. The existing form of education simply could not prepare people for integration in the process of democratisation because it contradicted that very process and 203

CHAPTER 3

opposed the emergence of the people into Brazilian public life. And since Brazil’s cultural history had not provided them even with the habits of political and cultural solidarity appropriate to their democratic form of government, they had to appeal to education as a cultural action by means of which the Brazilian people could learn, in place of the old passivity, new attitudes and habits of participation and intervention. They had also to accept the challenge of the alarming rates of illiteracy and, ideally, since a literacy programme was only part of that need, to work on it and education for intervention simultaneously. In some regions of the country, the Universities had made a noteworthy effort to prepare technicians, professionals, researchers and scientists. But while the battle for development could not be ignored, the Brazilians could not afford to lose the battle for humanization. Along these lines two experiments of the greatest importance are worth mentioning: that of Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB) and of the University of Brasilia. Both were frustrated by the military coup of 1964, says Freire. Until the formation of ISEB, the point of reference for the majority of Brazilian intellectuals was Brazil as an object of European and North American thought. As a rule they thought about Brazil from a non-Brazilian point of view. The cultural development was judged according to criteria and perspectives in which Brazil itself constituted a foreign element. The Brazilian intellectual lived in an imaginary world, which he/she could not transform. Turning his/her back on his/her own world, sick of it, he/she suffered because Brazil was not Europe or the United States. Because he/she adopted the European view of Brazil as a backward country, he/she negated Brazil; the more he/she wanted to be a man/woman of culture, the less he/she wanted to be a Brazilian. ISEB which reflected the climate of disalienation characteristic of the transitional phase, constituted the negation of this negation by thinking of Brazil as its own reality, as a project. To think of Brazil as a subject was to identify oneself with Brazil as it really was. The power of the ISEB thinking had its origin in this integration with the newly discovered and newly valued national reality. Two important consequences emerged: the creative power of the intellectuals who placed themselves at the service of the national culture, and commitment to the destiny of the reality these intellectuals considered and assumed as their own. It was not by accident that ISEB, although it was not a university, spoke to and was heard by an entire university generation and although it was not a workers’ organisation, held conferences in trade unions. Thinking of Brazil as a subject also characterised the University of Brasilia, which deliberately avoided the importation of alienated models. It sought to transform the Brazilian reality on the basis of the true understanding of its process. It is through this analysis that Freire wanted to explain the economic, political, social and educational conditions of Brazil, basing his analysis on his personal experience and the works of authors like Gilberto Freyre and others. Education as the Practice of Freedom has a genesis worth noting. According to Freire, ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed could not have been gestated within me solely by reason of my stint with SESI. But my stint with SESI was fundamental to its development. Even before Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my time with SESI wove 204


a tapestry of which Pedagogy was a kind of inevitable extension. I refer to my dissertation I defended in what was then the University of Pernambuco: “Educacao e atualidade brasileira”. I later reworked my dissertation and published it as Educacao como Pratica de Liberdade and that book became the forerunner of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.’64 Denis L. Collins in his book Paulo Freire: His Life, Works and Thoughts says at one point of his analysis of Freire’s life and thought, ‘Here I would like to pause in my account of the events of Freire’s life to begin speaking about his writings and especially about his first work, Education as the Practice of Freedom. Up until 1973, the principal difficulty for North Americans who wished to study Freire was the relative inaccessibility of his written works. Cultural Action for Freedom (1970) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) were published here in the United States but with the exception of Freire’s Harvard seminars attended by a privileged few in 1968–69, those books were the only introduction to Freire’s thoughts that the majority of the American scholars had at their disposal. Not until 1973 was Education as the Practice of Freedom translated into English ...’65 Collins states further, ‘It is unfortunate that Freire’s first American critics did not have access to his first work, because his narrative of the Brazilians’ struggle for liberation and his exposition of his pedagogical methods are much richer there than in the English works mentioned above.’66 Collins recommended it as the best introduction to Freire’s thoughts.67 Robert Mackie writes, ‘Freire’s period in Chile was especially fruitful in other ways as well. During this time he wrote up his Brazilian experience in the monograph Education as the Practice of Freedom, which was published in Rio in 1967 with an introduction contributed by his colleague Francisco Weffort.’68 Eclecticism Paulo Freire showed an uncanny ability in demonstrating that concepts existing in other domains of knowledge could be meaningfully utilized for constructing a theoretical base for adult education. The seed of this eclecticism is first visible in Education as the Practice of Freedom. However, while utilizing or incorporating concepts of others for such purposes, Freire would suitably modify the connotation to serve the purpose for which it is borrowed. This book is divided into four chapters: Society in Transition, Closed Society and Democratic Experiences, Education versus Massification and Education and Conscientizacao followed by a brief postscript and an Appendix on his literacy method. In the first chapter entitled Society in Transition, we find the Freirean concept of the relationship between human beings and the world. Here we find Freire distinguishing between humans and animals – a human being’s separateness from and openness to the world distinguishes him/her as a being of relationships. Human beings, unlike animals, are not only in the world but with the world.69 Human beings relate to the world in a critical way, says Freire. They apprehend the objective data of their reality through reflection – not by reflex as do animals.70 205

CHAPTER 3

It is apparent that Freire is taking recourse to an existentialist concept here. But the word critical gives the Freirean tinge. And in the act of critical perception, human beings discover their own temporality, says Freire.71 Transcending a single dimension, they reach back to yesterday, recognize today and come upon tomorrow. The dimensionality of time is one of the fundamental discoveries of human culture, says Freire.72 It is borrowed from existentialism, as mentioned earlier. Sartre distinguishes being for itself from being in itself.73 Freire incorporates the Sartrian theme in his scheme. Freire says that the greatest tragedy of the modern human being is his/her domination by force of various myths and his/her manipulation by organised advertising, ideological or otherwise. This is borrowed from Heidegger.74 This inauthentic existence, accessed from Heidegger is then corroborated by Eric Fromm.75 If the human beings are unable to perceive critically the themes of our time, says Freire, and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in the wake of change. Now, the theme of a certain period in history, the epoch is closely connected to the Marxists’ principal contradiction of a certain period in history. During the period after the Second World War, the principal contradiction was between imperialism and national liberation.76 Freire compared Brazil to the ‘closed society’ that Karl Popper described in his book “Open Society and its Enemies”.77 It is another example of how Freire could connect diverse schools of thought to illuminate his own ideas. The starting point for the Brazilian transition was that ‘closed society’ to which Freire referred. One whose raw material export economy was determined by an external market, whose very center of economic decision was located abroad – ‘reflex’, ‘object’, society lacking a sense of nationhood. Backward, illiterate, anti-dialogical, elitist. Thus Freire describes the Brazilian society. This characterisation closely resembles Andre Gunder Frank’s description of Brazil – which was elaborated in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil.78 Frank’s concept of a metropolis-satellite was accessed by Freire and he even extended it to the sphere of culture.79 While dwelling on Brazil’s endeavour to proceed towards a more open society, Freire quotes from an Encyclical letter issued by Pope John XXIII urging the rich not to aid the poor by means of ‘disguised forms of colonial domination.’80 Thus Freire did not hesitate to take recourse to Christian religious tradition to illuminate his point of view. A very important concept of Freire, conscientizacao which he says represents the awakening of critical consciousness, is in our opinion, closely related to Christian ideas of conscience but given a secular use. In a short, yet powerful chapter entitled ‘Closed Society and Democratic Experience’, we find Freire giving expression to the lack of development of democratic institutions in Brazil – a society which is inherited from a system based on slavery as the principal form of economic production. Freire has been overwhelmingly influenced by the analyses of Gilberto Freyre, the great Brazilian sociologist. Any reader of Freire can observe the close connection between Freyre’s works such as The Masters and the Slave,81 The Mansion and the Shanties82 and Order 206


and Progress83 and the content of this chapter in Education as the Practice of Freedom. In the third chapter entitled ‘Education versus Massification,’ Freire explained that during the period of transition to a more open society, it was essential to achieve economic development as a support for democracy, thereby eroding the oppressive power of the rich over the poor. This development, he asserted, would necessarily be autonomous and national in character. It could not limit itself to technical questions or ‘pure’ economic policy or structural reform, but would also have to involve the passage from one mentality to another: the support of basic reforms as a foundation for development and development as a foundation for democracy itself. Like Grundtvig two hundred years before him, Freire seamlessly connects development and democracy with education and enlightenment. The special contribution of the educator to the birth of the new society would have to be critical education, says Freire. Various stages of consciousness – semi-transitivity, naive-transitivity and critical transitivity are Freire’s own innovations to depict consciousness of the people during colonial, post-colonial and modern times. To justify the stage of critical transitive consciousness, Freire finds support from Mannheim.84 Freire’s use of the term ‘massification’ is pregnant with meaning. He writes “.... an analysis of highly technological societies usually reveals ‘domestication’ of humans’ critical faculties by a situation in which he/she is massified and has only the illusion of choice.” This domestication is, according to Freire, a gift of mass media. Freire corroborates this hypothesis with the help of C. Right Mills.85 Freire stresses the need to practise democracy in order to learn it. He wants people to ‘wonder’ rather than simply ‘do’ things. And he seeks support from Whitehead for his contention.86 Criticizing the Brazilians for their ‘verbal’ culture, Freire seeks justification in Erich Fromm87 and Fernando de Azevado.88 An education that would broaden the mind and not create only specialists – which Freire felt as the requirement of the age finds support from Jacques Maritain.89 Innovation in Literacy and Education Freire’s concept of literacy and education emanate from the realities of the then semi-colonial, semi-feudal Brazil. These ideas, therefore, are appropriate to the needs of the developing world. Like Karl Marx who saw in the working class of the newly developing capitalist societies the prime-mover of social progress, Freire discovered in the adult illiterate of the Third World an untapped revolutionary potential. No one before Freire developed the philosophical basis for the educational practice of the illiterate adults. Freire not only filled this gap but also propounded a theory of knowledge based on practice which revolutionised the whole concept of adult education. He obliterated the dichotomy between theory and practice. Given the diversity of the objective conditions of the developing world, characterised by their different courses of their history, this theory of knowledge could be regionspecific or country-specific. But the unique contribution of Freire lies in the fact 207

CHAPTER 3

that in most of the developing world, Freirean theory and practice can be successfully adapted to local needs and peculiarities. Essential elements of the Freirean concepts of education of adults are available in his book Education as the Practice of Freedom. Written just after the military coup in Brazil in 1964, this book offers his experiences in literacy in an unadulterated form devoid of unnecessary theorizing. ‘Experiences as the coordinator of the Adult Education project of the Movement for Popular Culture in Recife’, says Freire, ‘led to maturing of my early educational convictions. Through this project, we launched a new institution of popular culture, a “culture circle”, since among us a school was a traditionally passive concept. Instead of a teacher, we had a coordinator; instead of lectures, dialogues; instead of pupils, group participants; instead of alienating syllabi, compact programs that were broken down and “codified” into learning units’.90 Please note that here the programme is meant for people who are not to be “taught” but discussed with. The participants are not “students” but individuals who have a lot of wisdom and who deserve a dignified approach. The “teacher” is absent and so the top-down mode. Freire continues: ‘In the culture circles, we attempted through group debates either to clarify situations or seek action arising from that clarification. The topics of these debates were offered us by the groups themselves. Nationalism, profit remittances abroad, the political evolution of Brazil, development, illiteracy, the vote for illiterates, democracy were some of the themes which were repeated from group to group. These subjects and others were schematized as far as possible and presented to groups with visual aids, in the form of dialogue.’91 From this premise of knowledge, Freire developed his methods of literacy based on the dictum, “from the known to the unknown”. The adult-illiterates were knowledgeable people in the sense that they survived on the basis of their knowledge, skill and labour in a highly competitive and cruel world. What they lacked was alphabetisation. So Frerie tried to remove this gap so that alphabets could be used as a weapon in their struggle: from the knowledge of the world to the word and then again clarification of the knowledge of the world on the basis of acquired knowledge. After six months of experience with the culture circles, ‘we asked ourselves if it would not be possible to do something in the field of adult literacy which would give us similar results.’92 It is from the organisation of culture circles that the idea of adult literacy evolved. Literacy was a further instrument in the hands of those who discussed their own plight and that of society in the culture circles. Literacy was not the end but the means towards clarification of human life, to borrow a phrase from Grundtvig.93 Freire writes, ‘From the beginning, we rejected the hypothesis of a purely mechanistic literacy programme and considered the problem of teaching adults how to read in relation to awakening of their consciousness. We wished to design a project in which we would attempt to move from the naivete to a critical attitude at the same time we taught reading. We wanted a literacy programme which would be an introduction to the democratization of culture, a programme with people as 208


its Subjects rather than as patient recipients, a proramme which itself would be an act of creation, capable of releasing other creative acts, one in which students would develop the impatience and vivacity which characterize search and invention.’94 The Freirean method was based on dialogue which is a horizontal relationship between persons95 and not a vertical relationship...96 ‘Whoever enters into a dialogue does so with someone about something; and that something ought to constitute the new content of our proposed education. We felt that even before teaching the illiterate to read, we could help him/her overcome his/her magic or naive understanding and to develop an increasingly critical understanding.’97 Freire further adds, ‘It is remarkable to see with what enthusiasm these illiterates engage in debate and with what curiosity they respond to questions implicit in the codifications. In the word of Odilon Ribeiro Coutinho, these “detemporalised men/women begin to integrate themselves in time”.’98 Discussing work and culture, Freire writes, ‘The participants go on to discuss culture as a systematic acquisition of human experience, and to discover that in a lettered culture this acquisition is not limited to oral transmission, as is the case in unlettered cultures which lack graphic signs. They conclude by debating the democratization of culture which opens the perspective of acquiring literacy.’99 Elaborating the concept of ‘generating word’ and its impact upon participants, Freire says, ‘I have the school of the world said an illiterate .......... which led Professor Jomard de Brito to ask in an essay, “What can one presume to ‘teach’ an adult who affirms ‘I have the school of the world.”’100 Here, in this book, we find some valuable insights regarding the practical and epistemological characteristics of education for illiterate adults. The first that Freire suggests is ‘researching the vocabulary of the group with which one is working.’101 Very often, the language they speak and read do not have anything in common. Freire wanted to ground literacy to the reality as experienced by the adult learner. This mechanism provides adult literacy with a solid foundation. The knowledge gained by the adult literate does not belong to an unknown world. The participants of the culture circle can relate the topics of discussion to their own existential reality. The to and fro movement from the text to the context and vice-versa, as Freire explained in many of his articles on this theme, develop the critical thinking of the adult learners. The language of discourse finds the pride of place in the text and eventually embellishes the language itself. The language of the common folk, usually extremely rich in its metaphor and ornamentation, rejuvenates enormously the so-called elitist language and help it survive occasional degradation. Like a tree which is rooted in the soil, the language which is sustained by the common people regenerates itself. Thus, in Freirean concept, adult literacy, if conducted properly, can rejuvenate the language. Freire’s second observation is regarding selection of the generative words. These words have to be carefully chosen from the reality of the learner so that these serve not only as the gateway to literacy but also to conscientization or development of critical consciousness. The following criteria should govern their selection: a) Phonemic richness b) Phonetic difficulty (the words chosen should correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, placed in a sequence moving 209

CHAPTER 3

gradually from words of less to those of greater difficulties); c) pragmatic tone, which implies a greater engagement of a word in a given social, cultural and political reality.102 Thirdly, creation of what Freire calls ‘codifications’ – the representation of typical existential situations of the groups with which one is working.103 Fourthly, the elaboration of the agenda which should serve as mere aids to the coordinators, never as rigid schedules to be obeyed.104 Education as the Practice of Freedom has in embryonic forms almost all the elements that Freire introduced in his later works, particularly, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Cultural Action for Freedom. This was observed by Denis Goulet,105 who wrote in the introduction of Education as the Practice of Freedom: ‘American readers of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will find in Education as the Practice of Freedom the basic components of Freire’s literacy method. These elements are: – participant observation of educators “turning in” to the vocabular universe of the people; – their arduous search for generative words at two levels: syllabic richness and a high charge of experiential movement; – a first codification of these words into visual images which stimulate people “submerged” in the culture of silence to “emerge” as conscious makers of their own “culture”; – the codification by a “culture circle” under the self-effacing stimulus of a coordinator who is no “teacher” in the conventional sense, but who has become an educator-educatee – in dialogue with educatee – educators too often treated by formal educators as passive recipients of knowledge; – a creative new codification, this one explicitly critical and aimed at action, wherein those who were formerly illiterate now begin to reject their role as mere “objects” in nature and social history and undertake to become “Subjects” of their own destiny. Dehumanization of the society is the principal concern of the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Its seed may be found in Education as the Practice of Freedom (the chapter entitled “Closed Society and Democratic Inexperience”)106. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the theme has been presented in a generalised form whereas in Education as the Practice of Freedom, the particular slavocratic experience of Brazil has been put forward. The narrative character of teacher-student relationship has been elaborated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire termed it as the banking concept of education. The seed of this concept may be found in Education as the Practice of Freedom (in the chapter “Education versus Massification”.)107 In the chapter ‘Education and Conscientizacao’108, we find the concepts of dialogue and critical consciousness beside those elements mentioned by Denis Goulet: instead of teacher and student, coordinator and participant; culture circle; art and folk art; temporalization; culture; codification and decodification; conscientizacao etc. All these elements were either elaborated or differently presented in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 210


Extrapolation of the concept of “subject” and “object” society in the sphere of culture109 – taking cue from Andre Gunder Frank’s metropolis-satellite structure in the economic sphere – has been elaborated in ‘Cultural Action for Freedom’110 which was presented as a lecture at the University of Harvard and later published in a book form in 1970. Thus the seeds of almost all the revolutionary concepts that Freire introducted in the body of people’s education were to be found in his first book Education as the Practice of Freedom. EXTENSION OR COMMUNICATION

Introduction Denis Goulet in his preface to the volume Education for Critical Conciousness which is a collection of two essays Education as the Practice of Freedom and Extension or Communication writes, “The futility of looking to the Freire ‘method’ as a panacea is dramatized in this volume’s second essay “Extension or Communication”. This work, written in Chile in 1968, applies the lessons of “Conscientização” to a domain of vital importance in Latin America, namely, rural extension. Extension workers and country agents are familiar figures on the U.S. rural landscape; they bring advanced techniques and products developed in agricultural schools and land grant colleges to the farmers. And in recent decades, rural extension on the U.S. model has spread throughout Latin Amarica. In many areas, extension stands as the epitome of technical assistance.”111 Pointing out this backgromel of extension in the United States, Goulet writes further, “Nevertheless, as he analyses the terms “extension” and “communication”, and the realities underlying them, Freire detects a basic contradiction between the two. Genuine dialogue with peasants, he holds, is incompatible with “extending” to them technical expertise or agricultural knowhow. Consequently, “Extension or Commication” cannot be read as a specialized tract of interest only to rural people. On the contray, it has general significance precisely because it demystifies all “aid” or “helping” relationships. What the author says of extension agents he might also say of social workers, city planners, welfare administrators, community organigers, political militants, and a host of others who allegedly render “services” to the poor or the powerless”.112 Thus Goulet finds relevance of Freire’s thresis even in the context of a highly developed country that United States is. He adds, “Freire insists that methodological failings can always be traced to ideological errors. Behind the practice of agricultural extension, he sees an (implicit) ideology of paternalism, social control, and non-reciprocity between experts and “helpees”. If, on the other hand, one is to adopt a method which fosters dialogue and reciprocity, one must first be ideologically committed to equality, to the abolitition of privilege, and to non-elitist forms of leadership wherein special qualifications may be exercised, but are not perpetuated. In rejecting the lampuage and practice of extensionism, therefore, Freire does not negate the value of bringing agricultural technology or skills to peasants. But he asserts that those who have such knowledge must engage in dialogue wherein they may learn, together 211

CHAPTER 3

with peasants, how to apply their common partial knowledge to the totality of the problematised rural situation. Implied here is the judgement, which Freire makes unequivorally, that there can be no valid “aid” and that there is no room in development language for the terms “donors” and “recipients”. For this reason, therefore, “Extension or Communication” may strike readers in this country as a radical attack on U.S. foreign-aid policy and U.S. treatment of the domestic “poverty” issue. This exegesis of the oppressive character of all non-reciprocal relationships can best be read in tandem with Pedagorgy of the oppressed and Cultural Action for Freedom”.113 It has been pointed out earlier that Paulo Freire, as Jacques Chonchol’s consultant at the Institute for the Development of Animal Husbandry, in the area of what was then called Human Promotion in Chile, extended his collaboration to the Ministry of Education, together with people working in adult literacy as well as to the Corporation for Agrarian Reform. Sometime later, Paulo Freire began to work as a consultant for these organizations. This work necessitated travelling extensively all over Chile. He discussed with the peasants the country’s problems. He used to urge upon the agronomists and agricultural technologists to develop a political, pedagogical and democratic understanding of their practice. The outcome of this endeavour was the brilliant essay “Extension or Communication” which appeared in Spanish in 1968 with a precface by Jacques Chonchol. Jacques Chonchol wrote in his preface, “Freire’s thought is profound and at times difficult to follow but penetrating; its essence reveals a new world of truths, relations among these truths, and a logical ordering of concepts. We perceive that words, their meaning, their context, the actions of men, their struggle to dominate the natural world and to create their culture and their history form a totality in which each aspect has significance not only in itself but in function of the whole.”114 ‘More than just an analysis of the educational task of the agronomist (mistitled an “extension agent”)’, says chonchol,’ the present essay seems to me to be a profound synthesis of the role Paulo Freire attributes to education understood in its true perspective: that of humanizing man [and woman] through his/her conscions action to transform the world.’115 Chonchol elaborates, ‘Reading this essay makes us realize the poverty and limitations of the concept of agricultural extension which has prevailed among us and many other Latin American countries, in spite of the generosity and good will of those who have dedicated their lives to this work. We can see how their failure to achive more lasting results was due, in some cases, to their naive view of reality, but more commonly to the marked attitude of superiority and domination with which the technician confronted the peasant within a traditional agrarian structure.’116 ‘Freire shows us’, says Jacques Chonchol, ‘how the concept of extension leads to actions which transforms the peasant into a “thing”, an object of development projects which negate him as a being capable of transforming the world. In this concept the peasant is not educated but instead is treated as a depository for propaganda from an alien cultural world, containing the things which the 212


technician (who is modern and therefore superior) thinks the peasant ought to know in order to become modern also.’117 Chonchol further says, ‘In addition Freire emphasizes that from a humanist and scientific perspective one cannot focus on technical capacitation except within the context of a total cultural reality. Peasant attitudes toward phenomena like planting, harvest, erosion, and reforesting are related to their attitudes toward nature, their religious beliefs, their values and so forth. As a structure, this cultural totality cannot be affected in any of its parts without an automatic reflex occurring in the other dimensions. Thus, the agrononist-educator cannot bring about a change of peasant attitudes in regard to a particular aspect of life unless he knows their world view and confronts it in its totality.’118 Chonchol would like to stress ‘the importance of Freire’s criticism of the concept of extension as cultureal invasion, as an attitude contrary to the dialogue which forms the basis of an authentic education. He likewise deals with the concept of domination, so frequently found at the heart of traditional education, and shows how the latter, instead of freeing men [and women] enslaves them, reduces them to things, and manipulates them by not allowing them to act as Subjects in history and through this action to become authentic persons’119 He concludes by saying that, ‘Also fundamental is Freire’s analysis of the relationship between teachiques, modernization and humanism, as he shows how to avoid the traditionalism of the status quo without falling into technological messianism. As he quite correctly affirms, while “all development is modernization, not all modernization is development.”120 Critical Observation Semantic Analysis. A first concern in the beginning of this study, says Freire, is to make a critical analysis of the ‘extension’. From a semantic stand-point, he explains further, words have a ‘basic meaning’ and a ‘contextual meaning’.121 The term extension, in the sense with which we are concerned here, implies the action of extending: to extend something to.122 The person who extends, extends something to or towards someone. The expression ‘extension’ in the context: ‘Pedro is an agronomist working in rural extension’ means that Pedro is professionally engaged in an action which manifests itself in some kind of reality – an agricultural reality which would not exist as such if it were not for the existence of a human presence. The rural extension agents would never think that their act of extending could have the meaning: ‘Charles extends his hands’. On the contrary, the role of the extension agents is to extend, not their hands ‘but their knowledge and their technical capacities’. Thus the concept of extension which is characterised by the transference of techniques and knowledge is in direct contradiction to a truly humanist outlook.123 This is how Freire interprets the action of the rural extension agent. In its ‘field of association’, the term extension has a significant relation to transmission, handing over, giving, messianism, mechanical transfer, cultural invasion, manipulation, etc. All these terms imply actions which transform people 213

CHAPTER 3

into ‘things’ and negate their existence as beings who transform the world. They further negate the formation and development of real knowledge. They negate the true action and reflection which are the objects of these actions.124 It can be argued, says Freire, that this is not the meaning of extension. That extension is educative. It is for this reason that the first critical consideration of this investigation touches on the very concept of extension, on the ‘field of association’, of its meaning. [This] concept of extension does not correspond to an educational undertaking that is liberating.125 “One of the most difficult tasks is to persuade the rural masses to accept our propaganda and put these possibilities into practice… This task is precisely that of the extension agent, whose duty it is to maintain a permanent contact with the rural masses”. Freire quotes Willy Timmer of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and affirms that persuasion to accept propaganda is not an educational activity, as Timmer would have us believe.126 To persuade implies, fundamentally, a Subject who persuades, in some form or other, and an object on which the act of persuading is exercised. In this case, says Freire, the Subject is the extension agent and the object, is the peasant. They are the objects of a persuasion which will render them all the more susceptible to propaganda. Neither peasants nor anyone else can be persuaded or forced to submit to the propaganda myth, if they have the alternative option of liberation. Rather than a passive acceptance of propaganda, liberation implies problematization of their situation in its concrete objective reality so that being critically aware of it, they can also act critically on it. This, then, is the real work of the agronomists in their role of educators. Agronomists are specialists who work with others on the situation influencing them. However, from a truly humanistic point of view, it is not for them to extend, entrust or dictate their technical capacities, nor is it for them to persuade by using peasants as ‘blank pages’ for their propaganda. In their role as educators, they must refuse to ‘domesticate’ people. Their task is communication, not extension, concludes Freire.127 Gnosiological Misinterpretation Educating and educating oneself for the purpose of liberation, is the task of those who know that they know little (for this very reason they know that they know something and thus can succeed in knowing more) in dialogue with those who almost always think they know nothing. Their aim is that the latter can also know more by the transformation of their thinking that they know nothing into the knowledge that they know little.128 This is a brilliant observation on knowledge. There is in the concept of extension an unquestionably mechanistic connotation, inasmuch as the term implies an action of taking, of transferring, of handing over, and of depositing something in someone. This something that is being brought, transmitted, transferred (in order finally to be deposited in someone – the peasants), constitutes a group of technical processes, which imply knowledge, which are knowledge and which imply the following questions: Is the act of knowing that by which a subject, transformed into an object, patiently receives content from 214


another? Can this content, which is knowledge of, be treated as if it were something static? Is knowledge subject to historical–sociological conditioning? If a simple conscious awareness of things belonging to the sphere of mere opinion (doxa) does not constitute ‘absolute knowledge’, how can this sphere be superseded by one in which these things are revealed and the ‘raison d’etre’ of them touched?129 These are the questions Freire poses. The first gnosiological misinterpretation of extension lies in the following: If there exists a dynamic element in the practice suggested by such a concept, it is reduced to the act of extending, in which that which is extended becomes static. Consequently, the extending Subjects are active in that they are ‘actors’, in the presence of ‘spectators’ in whom they deposit what they extend.130 Knowing, whatever its level, says Freire, is not the act by which a Subject transformed into an object docilely and passively accepts the contents others give or impose on him or her. “Knowledge, on the contrary, necessitates the curious presence of Subjects confronted with the world. It requires their transforming action on reality. It demands a constant searching. It implies invention and re-invention. It claims from each person a critical reflection on the very act of knowing. It must be a reflection which recognizes the knowing process, and in this recognition becomes aware of the ‘raison d’etre’ behind the knowing and the conditioning to which that process is subjected.”131 Knowing, claims Freire, is the task of Subjects and not of objects. It is as a Subject, and only as such, that a man or woman can really know. In the learning process the only person who really learns is one who appropriates what is learned, who apprehends and thereby reinvents that learning; one who is able to apply the appropriated learning to concrete existential situations. On the other hand, the person who is filled by another with ‘contents’ whose meaning one is not aware of, which contradict one’s way of being in the world, cannot learn because one is not challenged. Thus, in a situation of knowing, teacher and student both must take on the role of conscious Subjects, mediated by the knowable object that they seek to know.132 Friere is afraid that the prevailing concept of extension does not allow for this possibility.133 Those who truly seek to know along with others the meaning of their involvement in this ‘dialogue’ of Subjects around a knowable object are not carrying out ‘extension’. On the other hand, if they do practise extension, they do not really share with others the conditions for knowing. If their action is merely that of extending elaborated ‘knowledge’ to those who do not possess it, they kill in them the critical capacity for possessing it. The most that can be done in the ‘extension’ process, gnosiologically speaking, says Freire, is to show people, without revelation or unveiling, the existence of a new presence: that of ‘extended’ contents.134 Human beings (who cannot be apprehended without their relations with the world, seeing that they are ‘beings-in-a-situation’) are beings who work and transform the world. They are beings of ‘praxis’: of action and of reflection. Humans find themselves marked by the results of their own actions in their relations with the world, and through their action on it. By acting they transform; by transforming 215

CHAPTER 3

they create a reality which conditions their manner of acting. Thus, it is impossible to dichotomise human beings and the world.135 It is through these relations, explains Friere, in which they transform and become aware of the presence of things (although this is not true knowing) that mere opinion or ‘doxa’ is developed. Here facts, natural phenomena, things are presences of which people are aware, but which are not revealed in their own true interrelationships.136 The reader who is aware of the Sartrian existentialist concept will discover that Freire is being heavily influenced by him. This is what happens in the magic or preponderantly magic cultures which are of fundamental interest in that they still constitute the state in which the great majority of the peasants of Latin America exist. When a people perceive a concrete fact of reality without ‘entering into’ it critically in order to be able to ‘look at’ it from within, they are faced with the appearance of a mystery and being unsure of themselves, assume a magical posture.137 ‘What can be done from the point of view of education in a peasant community which is at such a level?’ asks Freire. The answer, he asserts, cannot lie with these extension agents who, in their relations with the peasants mechanically transfer technical information.138 Human beings are active beings, capable of reflection on themselves and on the activity in which they are engaged. They are able to detach themselves from the world in order to find their place in it and with it. Only people are capable of this act of ‘separation’ in order to find their place in the world and enter in a critical way into their own reality,139 says Freire. The more we observe the behaviour patterns and the thought-habits of peasants, says Freire, the more we can conclude that in certain areas (to a greater or lesser degree) they come so close to the natural world that they feel themselves more part of this world than transformers of the world. There exists between them and their natural world (and obviously their cultural world) a strong ‘umbilical cord’ which binds them. This nearness which identifies them with the natural world makes the act of ‘entering into’ it difficult for them inasmuch as the nearness does not allow them to see in the perspective that which they ‘enter into’.140 Substituting ‘elaborated’ techniques for magic ways of acting involves cultural aspects and levels of perception which make up the social structure. It involves problems of language, which cannot be separated from thought just as thought and language cannot be separated from structure. In whatever moment of history a particular social structure exists (whether it is undergoing a rapid transformation or not) the main task of the agronomist-educator is to attempt to overcome the magic perception of reality, simultaneously achieving technical training. At the same time, it must overcome the ‘doxa’ by the ‘logos’ of reality.141 Any attempt at mass education, whether associated with professional training or not, whether in the agricultural sphere or in the urban and industrial field, must (for the reasons just analysed) possess a basic aim: to make it possible for human beings, through the problematizing of the unity being-world (or of human beings in their relations with the world and with other human beings) to penetrate more deeply the prise de conscience of the reality in which they exist. This deepening of 216


the prise de conscience, which must develop in the action which transforms reality, produces with this action an overlaying of basically sensuous knowledge of reality with that which touches the raison d’etre of this reality. People take over the position they have in their ‘here and now’. This results (and at the same time it produces this) in discovery of their own presence within a totality, within a structure, and not as ‘imprisoned’ or ‘stuck to’ the structure or its parts. When they do not perceive reality as the totality within which the different parts interact, they lose themselves in a ‘focalist’ vision of it. Merely to perceive reality partially deprives them of the possibility of a genuine action on reality.142 It is not possible for the agronomist-educator to attempt to change these attitudes [of the peasants] unless he or she is familiar with their view of the world, and unless one takes it as a whole. On the same level as the problematic discussion of erosion and reforestation, for example, the critical involvement of the peasants with their reality as a whole is imperative. To discuss erosion (in the problematizing dialogical conception of education), it must appear to the peasants in their ‘basic view’ as a real problem, as a ‘distinct perception’ firmly related to other problems. Erosion is not merely a natural problem, since the response to it, taking it as a challenge, is cultural. Indeed, the mere facing-up to the world by men and women is in a way already a cultural action. Because the answers peasants give to natural challenges are cultural, they cannot be replaced by superimposing the equally cultural response of ours that we ‘extend’ to them143. This observation is the result of real insight. For people at the grassroot level, erosion is intimately connected to their life and livelihood. Knowledge cannot be extended from those who consider that they know to those who consider that they do not know. Knowledge is built up in the relations between human beings and the world, relations of transformation, and perfects itself in the critical problematisation of these relations. In order to discuss any kind of technical question with the peasants, they must see this question as a ‘distinct perception’. If it is not this, it must become this. Whether it is a ‘distinct perception’ or not, the peasants still must in both cases apprehend the interplay of relations between the ‘distinct perception’ and other dimensions of reality.144 The effort required is not one of extension but of conscientizacao. If it is successfully carried out, it allows individuals to assume critically the position they have in relation to the rest of the world. The critical taking up of this position brings them to assume the true role incumbent on them as people. This is the role of being Subjects in the transformation of the world, which humanizes them. The work of agronomists thus cannot be the schooling or even the training of peasants in techniques of ploughing, sowing, harvesting, reforesting etc. If they limit themselves to a simple form of training, they can in certain circumstances obtain a better work-output.145 However, they will have contributed nothing (or nearly nothing) to the development of peasants as people. This means that the concept of extension, analysed from a semantic viewpoint, and from that of its gnosiological misinterpretation, does not square with the indispensable technical and humanistic work which it is the agronomist’s duty to carry out, says Freire.146 217

CHAPTER 3

Extension and Cultural Invasion Only human beings, that is, beings who work, who possess a thought language, who act and who are capable of reflection on themselves and on their own action (such actions becoming separate entities), are only the beings of praxis, says Freire. Only they are beings of relations in a world of relations. Their presence in this world, a presence which is a being with, comprises a permanent confrontation of the human being with the world. Detaching themselves from their surroundings, they transform their environment. They do not merely adapt to it. Humans are consequently beings of decision. Detachment from one’s environment can only be achieved in relation with that environment. Human beings are human because they exist in and with the world. This existing implies a permanent relation to the world as well as an action on it. This world, because it is a world of history and culture, is a world of men and women – not simply a world of “nature”.147 The vocabulary is reminiscent of existentialism of both Heidegger and Sartre. Being-with is Heideggerian Dasein’s relationship with the world. Among the various characteristics of the anti-dialogical theory of action, Freire chose to consider one: cultural invasion. Any invasion implies, of course, an invading Subject. His/her cultural-historical situation which gives him/her his/her vision of the world is the environment from which he/she starts out. He/she seeks to penetrate another cultural-historical situation and impose his/her system of values on its members. The invader reduces the people in the situation he/she invades to mere objects of his/her action.148 The relationships between the invader and the invaded are situated at opposite poles. They are relationships of authority. The invader acts, the invaded are under the illusion that they are acting through the action of the other; the invader has his/her say; the invaded, who are forbidden this, listen to what the invader says. The invader thinks, at most, about the invader, never with them; the latter have their thinking done for them by the former. The invader dictates; the invaded patiently accepts what is dictated. For the cultural invasion to be effective, and for the cultural invader to attain his/her objectives, the action must be supported by other complimentary actions, ones which constitute different dimensions of the antidialogue theory. Thus, any cultural invasion presupposes conquest, manipulation, and messianism on the part of the invader. It presupposes propaganda which domesticates rather than liberates. Since cultural invasion is an act of conquest per se, it needs further conquest to sustain itself.149 This is an outstanding analysis of the invader and the invaded – their cultural and psychological construct. Cultural invasion through dialogue cannot exist. There is no such thing as dialogical manipulation or conquest. These terms are mutually exclusive.150 If agronomists affirm their knowledge through dialogical work, they neither invade, manipulate nor conquer. They thus deny the connotation of the term ‘extension’.151 This is the crux of Freire’s argument. Men and women are beings who are in permanent relation with the world which they transform through their work to be aware of them as beings who know although this knowledge is manifested at different levels: of ‘doxa’, of magic and of ‘logos’ which is true knowledge. In spite of all this or perhaps because of it neither ignorance 218


nor knowledge can be absolute. No one can know everything, just as no one can be ignorant of everything. Knowledge begins with the awareness of knowing little (in the function of which one acts). And knowing that they know little, people are prepared to know more. If we possessed absolute knowledge, this knowledge could not exist because it would not be in a state of being. A person who knew everything would not be able to continue knowing because he/she would never ask anything. Human beings constantly create and re-create their knowledge, in that they are inconclusive, historical beings engaged in a permanent act of discovery. All new knowledge is generated from knowledge which has become old which in its term had been generated from previous knowledge. Thus, knowledge is in constant succession, such that all new knowledge, when it is established as such, becomes the basis for the knowledge which will replace it.152 Peasants refuse a dialogue not because they are by nature opposed to dialogue. There are historical-sociological, cultural and structural reasons for their refusal. Their existential shape is constituted within the limits of anti-dialogue. The latifundist structure which is colonial by nature, enables the landlord (because of strength and prestige) to extend his ‘possession’ over the people as well as over the land. This ‘possession’ of the people, who are more or less ‘reified’, is expressed through an interminable series of limitations which diminish their field of free acting. Even when the personality of a more humane landowner lends itself to the establishing of relations of affection between the landowner and his/her ‘tenants’, the ‘social distance’ between them is still not eliminated. Closeness of an affective type between persons of different ‘social status’ does not diminish the distance imposed by and implicit in the ‘status’. In this affective closeness one should observe not only the ‘humanitarianism’ of an individual but also the structure in which she/he is placed and by which she/he is conditioned. This is why the latifundiary structure cannot transform the humanitarianism of a few into the true humanism of all.153 In this rigid, vertical structure of relationships there is no real room for dialogue. It is within these same rigid vertical relations that the peasant consciousness is historically developed. This is the consciousness of the oppressed. With no experience of dialogue, with no experience of participation, the oppressed are often unsure of themselves. They have consistently been denied their right to have their say, having historically had the duty to only listen and obey. It is thus normal that they almost always maintain an attitude of mistrust towards those who attempt to dialogue with them. Actually, this distrustful attitude is directed also towards themselves. They are not sure of their own ability. They are influenced by the myth of their own ignorance. It is understandable that they prefer not to engage in a dialogue, that after fifteen or twenty minutes of active participation, they say to the educator: ‘excuse me, sir, we who don’t know, should keep quiet and listen to you who know”. Those who declare a dialogue to be impossible will probably say that those observations only serve to reinforce their hypothesis.154 Brilliant observation. Freire has gone to the root of anti-dialogue. A more serious question would be the investigation of the possibility of dialogue as long as there is no change in the latifundiary structure; since it is in this structure that the explanation of the silence of the peasants lies. This silence begins in one 219

CHAPTER 3

way or another to disappear in areas undergoing agrarian reform or subject to the indirect influence of such areas as Freire claims he observed in Chile. Be this as it may……. it will not be with anti-dialogue that the silence of the peasants will be broken, but with a dialogue in which this very silence and its causes are presented as a problem.155 Time spent on a dialogue should not be considered as time wasted. It presents problems and criticizes, and in criticizing, gives human beings their place within their own reality as the true transforming Subjects of reality. Even when we regard the work of the agronomist-educator as limited to no more than the teaching of new techniques, there is no comparison between dialogue and anti-dialogue.156 If education is dialogical, it is clear that the role of the teacher is important, whatever the situation. As she/he dialogues with the pupils, she/he must draw their attention to points that are unclear or naïve, always looking at them problematically.157 The role of the educator is not to ‘fill’ the educatee with ‘knowledge’, technical or otherwise. It is rather to attempt to move towards a new way of thinking in both the educator and the educatee, through the dialogical relationships between them both. The flow is in both directions.158 These observations have found their way in Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We find their embryo in this essay. Cultural Transformation Agronomists cannot reduce their actions to a non-existent neutrality as if technicians were isolated from the wider universe in which they exist as human beings. From the moment in which they enter and participate in the systems of relationships between human beings and nature, their work takes on a broader perspective in which the technical training of the peasants becomes one with other dimensions which lie beyond the domain of technology. It is this unavoidable responsibility of the agronomists which establishes them as educators and makes them (among others) agents of change. This means that their participation in the system of relationships between the peasants, nature and culture cannot be reduced to a being before or a being over or a being for the peasants but a being with them in that they also are subjects of change.159 This responsibility is not exclusively that of the agronomist-educator, nor even of educators in general, but of all those who in one way or another contribute to the building up of the impact of agrarian reform. Like the process of structural change, this process cannot be interpreted as a mechanical one, outside of time, which does not require the participation of human beings. Agrarian reform is not a purely technical matter. It involves political decisions that give effect and impulse to the technological proposals which, in that they are not neutral, affirm the ideological positions of the technologists. New technology can thus either support or negate the active participation of the peasants as truly co-responsible elements in the process of change….. ‘It is not technical methods but the association of man and his tools which transforms a society’. [Octavio Paz]160 220


In the process of agrarian reform, there should be no exclusive support for either ‘technology’ or for ‘humanity’. Any program of agrarian reform which regards these two terms as antagonistic is naive, whether it is the attitude superficially termed ‘humanist’ which denies techniques or whether it is the myth of techniques which in turn implies a dehumanization, a kind of messianism of techniques, conferring on technology the role of an infallible saviour. This messianism nearly always ends up by instigating the kind of programs in which humans are diminished in stature.161 Modernisation of a purely mechanical automatic and manipulating type, says Freire, has the center of decision for change not in the area undergoing transformation but outside it. The society in transformation is not the subject of its own transformation. On the contrary, the point of decision in the process of development lies within the being undergoing transformation – the process is not a mechanical one. Hence, while all development is modernization, not all modernization constitute development.162 This is axiomatic. Freire unveils the relationship between development and modernization. Agrarian reform should be a process of development which will result in the modernization of the rural areas along with the modernization of agriculture. If this is how agrarian reform is seen, the modernization resulting from that reform will not be the product of an automatic passage from the old to the new. In the nonmechanical concept, the new is born from the old through the creative transformation emerging from advanced technology combined with the empirical methods of the peasants. It is on this cultural foundation – from which their forms of behaviour and their perception of reality are comprised – that all those who have some responsibility for the process of agrarian reform must base their work,163 says Freire. It should be obvious that while the transformation of the structure of latifundia together with the reform of land tenure (followed by the application of new technology) is unquestionably a factor of change in the peasant perception, this does not mean that one can dispense with action on the cultural plane. As a general process, agrarian reform cannot be limited to unilateral actions in the sphere of production – commercialization, techniques etc. It should rather unite such efforts to other equally necessary forms of action: deliberate, systematized, planned, cultural transformations. Hence, Freire asserts that, in agrarian reform in Chile the ‘settlement’, precisely because it is a production unit should also be a pedagogical unit, in the broad sense of the term. This pedagogical unit is one in which the educators are not only those who happen to work with what is usually termed education but also agronomists, planners, researchers, peasants – in fact all those who have some connection with the process.164 Freire, elaborating how technocrats could think mechanically about modernization and change, further explains: The technocrats would also think in this way if, following the same line of thought, they were approached about study and research on the different levels of peasant consciousness. Such consciousness is conditioned by the structure in which this consciousness is developed through historical and existential experience, and therefore could provide critical information for the developing of reform programs. However, technocrats would be unable to understand the ‘remaining behind’ in the transformed structure of the ‘mythical aspects’ 221

CHAPTER 3

forming part of the old structure. As orthodox technocrats it is sufficient for them for the structure to be transformed in such a way that everything that made up the former structure is eliminated. When, failing to recognize the people as cultural beings, they do not achieve the results they were expecting from their unilaterally technical action, they seek an explanation for their failure – and always find it ‘in the natural incapacity of the peasants’. Their error is to fail to recognize that the time in which generations live, experience, work, and die is not calendar time. It is a ‘real’ time or ‘duration’ as Bergson calls it. Thus it is a time made up of events in which the peasants build through the generations their way of being (or state of being) which carries over into the new structure. This is why when the time in agrarian reform – a new time – is generated from the old time, the old coexists with the new. The peasants in the ‘new time’ thus manifest in their behaviour the same duality which they had under the structure of ‘latifundia’. This is completely normal. ‘Human beings are not just what they are, but also what they were’, they are in a state of being, this being a characteristic of human existence. Human existence, therefore, contrary to animal or vegetable life, is a process taking place in one’s own time. There exists, then, a solid link between the present and the past, within which the present points towards the future, all within the framework of historical continuity.165 In conclusion, Freire says, inspired by a critical vision of agrarian reform, the agronomists should concentrate on something more than mere technical aid. As agents of change, together with the peasants (who themselves are agents) it is incumbent on them to enter into the process of transformation, conscientizing both peasants and themselves at the same time.166 This then is the basic task of the agronomist: rather than being a removed and distant technocrat the agronomist is an educator who is involved, who goes into the process of transformation with the peasants, as a Subject with other Subjects.167 Extension or Communication? Humans, as beings of relationships, are challenged by nature, which they transform through their work. The result of this transformation, which separates itself off from them, is their world. This is the world of culture which is prolonged into the world of history …. The social, human world would not exist if it were not a world able to communicate. Without communication human knowledge could not be propagated.168 Communication implies a reciprocity which cannot be broken. Hence, it is not possible to comprehend thought without its double function, as something which learns and as something which communicates ……To communicate is to communicate about the significant content of the object. Thus during communication there are no passive Subjects. Subjects showing co-intentionality towards the object of their thought communicate its content to each other. Communication is characterised by the fact that it is a dialogue, in that a dialogue communicates.169 Elaborating some theories of Eduardo Nicol and Adam Schaff, Freire concludes with the humanist aspect that inspires the work of communication between 222


technicians and peasants in the process of agrarian reform. This humanist aspect, he asserts, is not abstract. It is concrete and rigorously scientific. This humanism is not based on visions of an ideal human being, separated from the world, the portrait of an imaginary person, however well-intentioned the person imagining might be. This humanism does not try to concretize a timeless model, a sort of idea or myth, for in this way humans become alienated. This humanism does not claim to be a what will be for lack of a critical vision of concrete human beings who tragically are in a state of being which is almost not being ……This humanism is based on science.170 It is a humanism concerned with the humanization of men and women, rejecting all forms of manipulation as the contradiction of liberation. This humanism which sees men and women in the world and in time, ‘mixed in’ with reality, is only true humanism when it engages in action to transform the structures in which they are reified. This humanism refuses both despair and naïve optimism, and is thus hopefully critical. Its critical hope rests on an equally critical belief, the belief that human beings can make and re-make things, that they can transform the world. A belief then that human beings, by making and remaking things and transforming the world, can transcend the situation in which their state of being is almost a state of non-being, and go on to a state of being in search of becoming more fully human. This scientific humanism (which cannot fail to be loving) must be aided by the action through communication of the agronomist-educator.171 Education as a Gnosiological State The human being is a conscious body. His or her consciousness, with its ‘intentionality’ towards the world, is always consciousness of something. It is in a permanent state of moving towards reality. Hence the condition of the human being has to be in constant relationship to the world. In this relationship subjectivity, which takes its form in objectivity, combines with the latter to form a dialectical unity from which emerges knowledge closely linked with action. This is why unilaterally subjective and objective explanations which sever this dialectic are unable to comprehend reality.172 A Sartrian explanation of consciousness. Human beings must be seen in their interaction with reality which they feel and perceive, and on which they exercise the process of transformation. It is in its dialectical relations with reality that education is discussed as a constant process for the liberation of human beings. Education cannot view men and women isolated from the world nor the world without men and women … History, as a period of human events, is made by human beings at the same time as they ‘make’ themselves in history. If the work of education, like any other human undertaking, cannot operate other than ‘within’ the world of human beings (which is a historical-cultural world), the relations between the human beings and the world must constitute the starting point for our reflections on that undertaking. These relations do not constitute a mere enunciation, a simple sentence. They involve a dialectical situation in which one of the poles is the person and the other the objective world – a world in creation, as it were. If this historical-cultural world were a created, finished world, 223

CHAPTER 3

it would no longer be susceptible to transformation. The human being exists as such, and the world is a historical-cultural one, because the two come together as unfinished products in a permanent relationship, in which human beings transform the world and undergo the effects of their transformation. In this dynamic, historicalcultural process, one generation encounters the objective reality marked out by another generation and receives through it the imprints of reality.173 Education …. to be authentic must be liberating. One of its basic preoccupations must be the greater penetration of the ‘prise de conscience’ which operates in human beings when they act and when they work. This deepening of the prise de conscience which takes place through conscientization, is not and never can be intellectual or an individualistic effort. Conscientization cannot be arrived at by a psychological, idealist subjectivist road, nor through objectivism … Just as the prise de conscience cannot operate in isolated individuals, but through the relations of transformation they establish between themselves and the world, so also conscientization can only operate in this way. The prise de conscience, which is a human characteristic results … in a person’s coming face to face with the world and with concrete reality, which is presented as a process of objectification. Any objectification implies a perception which is conditioned by the elements of its own reality.174 If the prise de conscience goes beyond the mere apprehension of the presence of a fact, and places it critically in the systems of relationships within the totality in which it exists, it transcends itself, deepens and becomes conscientization. This effort of the prise de conscience to transcend itself and achieve conscientization, which always requires one’s critical insertion in the reality which one begins to unveil, cannot be individual but social… Conscientization which can only be manifested in the concrete praxis is never neutral; in the same way, education can never be neutral. Those who talk of neutrality are precisely those who are afraid of losing their right to use neutrality to their own advantage. In the conscientization process the educator has the right, as a person, to have options. What the educator does not have is the right to impose them … The false educator can only ‘domesticate’ because instead of undertaking the critical task of demystifying reality, she/ he mythifies it further. It is indispensable for such educators to issue communiqués instead of communicating and receiving communications.175 ‘Education as the practice of freedom’ is not the transfer or transmission of knowledge or cultures. Nor is it the extension of technical knowledge. It is not the act of depositing reports or facts in the educatee… (it is) a truly gnosiological situation. In this the act of knowing does not have its term in the knowable object since it is communicated to other Subjects which are also capable of knowing. In the educational process of liberation, the educator-educatee and the educatee-educator are both cognitive Subjects before knowable objects which mediate them.176, says Freire. In the truly gnosiological education, there is not one particular moment in which, all alone in a library or laboratory, the educators know and another moment in which they simply narrate, discourse on, or explain the knowledge ‘received’. At the moment in which educators carry out their research, when as cognitive subjects, they stand face to face with a knowable object, they are only apparently alone. 224


Not only do they establish a mysterious, invisible dialogue with those who carried out the same act of knowing before them, but they also engage in a dialogue with themselves too. Placed face to face before themselves they investigate and question themselves. The more they ask questions, the more they feel that their curiosity about the object of this knowledge is not decreasing. It only diminishes if it is isolated from human beings and the world,177 observes Freire. This is why, explains Freire, dialogue as a fundamental part of the structure of knowledge needs to be opened to other Subjects in the knowing process. Thus the class is not a class in the traditional sense, but a meeting place where knowledge is sought and not where it is transmitted. Just because the educator’s task is not dichotomized into two separate moments, education is a permanent act of cognition …. whenever an educatee ask a question, educators, in their explanations remake the whole previous effort of cognition. Remaking the effort does not, however, mean repeating it as it was. It means making a new effort, in a new situation, in which new aspects which were not clear before are clearly presented to the educatee. New ways of access to the object are opened to him or her.178 The teachers who do not make this effort, because they merely memorize their lessons, must of necessity reject education as a gnosiological condition and can thus have no love for the dialogue of communication. Education for them is the transfer of ‘knowledge’. It consists in extending this ‘knowledge’ to passive educatees and preventing them from experiencing the development of the active, participatory condition, characteristic of someone who knows. This false conception of education, based on the depositing of ‘reports’ in the educatees, is a basic obstacle to transformation. It is an anti-historical conception of education. Educational systems based on this conception surround themselves with a ‘barricade’ which inhibits creativity. For creativity does not develop within an empty formalism, but within the praxis of human beings with each other in the world and with the world. In this praxis action and reflection constantly and mutually illuminate each other. Its practice, which involves a theory from which it is inseparable, also implies the attitude of someone seeking knowledge, and not someone passively receiving it. Thus, when education is not a truly gnosiological condition, it diminishes into a verbalism which, because it frustrates, is not inconsequential.179 If education is the relation between Subjects, in the knowing process mediated by the knowable object, in which the educator permanently reconstructs the act of knowing, it must then be problem-posing. The task of the educator is to present to the educatees as a problem the content which mediates them, and not to discourse on it, give it, extend it or hand it over as if it were a matter of something already done, constituted, completed or finished. In the act of problematizing the educatees, the educator is problematized too. Problematization is so much a dialectical process that it would be impossible for any one to begin it without becoming involved in it. No one can present something to someone else as a problem and at the same time remain a mere spectator of the process. She/he will be problematized even if methodologically speaking, she/he prefers to remain silent after posing the problem, while the educatees capture, analyze and comprehend it.180 How brilliantly Freire explains the process of knowing! 225

CHAPTER 3

In the process of problematization any step made by a Subject to penetrate the problem-situation continually opens up new roads for other Subjects to comprehend the object being analyzed. Educators who are problematized by engaging in this kind of action, ‘re-enter into’ the object of the problem through the ‘entering into’ of the educatees. This is why educators continue to learn. The humbler they are in this process, the more they will learn. Problematization takes place in the field of communication and concerns real, concrete, existential situations. Or it concerns intellectual contents again linked to the concrete. It requires that the interlocutorSubjects, who have been problematized, understand the total meaning of the signs (linguistic and otherwise) used in communication. The understanding of the signs comes from the dialogue, which makes possible the exact understanding of the terms with which the subjects express the critical analysis of the problem in which they are involved.181 An analysis of the concrete situations brings the subjects once more to see themselves in their confrontation with such situations and to undergo again this confrontation. Thus problematization implies a critical return to action. It starts from action and returns to it. The process of problematization is basically someone’s reflection on a content which results from an act, or reflection on the act itself in order to act better together with others within the framework of reality. There can be no problematization without reality.182 Of fundamental importance to education as an authentically gnosiological condition is the problematisation of the world of work, products, ideas, convictions, aspirations, myths, art, science, the world in sort of culture and history which is the result of the relations between human beings and the world. To present this human world as a problem for human beings is to propose that they ‘enter into’ it critically, taking the operation as a whole, their action, and that of others on it. It means ‘reentering into’ the world through the ‘entering into’ of the previous understandings which may have been arrived at naively because reality was not examined as a whole. In ‘entering into’ their own world, people become aware of their manner of acquiring knowledge and realize the need of knowing even more. In this lies the whole face of education in the gnosiological condition,183 says Freire. Men and women as Subjects in the knowing process (and not receivers of a ‘knowledge’ which others donate to them or prescribe for them) progress towards the raison d’etre of reality. Reality shows them progressively a world, a challenge and possibilities; of determinism and liberty; of negation and affirmation of their humanity; of permanence and transformation; of value and valuelessness; of expectation, in the hopefulness of search; and of expectation without hope in a fatalist inaction. The more they review critically their past and present experiences in and with the world, which they can see more clearly now because they are reliving it, the more they realize that the world is not a cul-de-sac for men and women, an unalterable state which crushes them. They discover – or become predisposed to discover – that education is not solely and exclusively permanence or change in something. …Education is ‘duration’ because it results from the interplay of these two opposites in dialogue. Education shows ‘duration’ in the contradiction of permanence and change.184 226


The above-mentioned dialectic – permanence/change – which makes the educational process ‘durable’, interprets education as something which is in a state of being and not something which is, says Freire. Hence its historical-sociological aspect. If education did not adapt to the rhythm of reality it would not ‘last’, because it would not be in a state of being. Thus education can also be a force for transformation, because it ‘lasts’ to the degree that it transforms itself. But its transformation must be the results of the transformation effected in the reality to which it applies. This is to say that the education of a society stops being in a state of being if it is determined by the transformations effected in another society on which it depends. If the education of a society does not exist in a concrete context, showing the influence of human beings and at the same time influencing them, it cannot advance the transformation of the reality of that society. Imported education, which is the manifestation of a form of being of an alienated culture, is something which is merely superimposed on the reality of the importing society. Hence this education which is not because it is not being in a dialectic relationship with its context contains no force of transformation for reality. As we can see, education as a gnosiological condition, which unites the educator and the educatee as Subjects in the process of knowing, opens for them innumerable and indispensable roads leading to their affirmation as beings of praxis.185 This analysis of ‘colonial’ education adequately explains why such education does not liberate but domesticate only. It is not possible to teach methods without problematizing the whole structure in which these methods will be used. No program of literacy training can exist – as the naïve claim – which is not connected with the work of human beings, their technical proficiency, their view of the world. Any education work, whether the educator is an agronomist or not, which only means discoursing, narrating or speaking about something, instead of challenging the capacity of reflection and knowledge of the educatees about it, not only neutralizes this capacity for knowledge, but merely skirts around the problems. The educator’s action encourages ‘naivete’ rather than conscientization on the part of the educatees. Thus the authenticity of technical aid depends upon its becoming educational actions transcending the procedures of purely technical ‘assistentialism,’186 says Freire. If education can be defended as an eminently gnosiological condition (which is therefore dialogical) in which educator-educatee and educatee-educator relations are problematized and unite around a knowable object, it is obvious that the point of departure of the dialogue is the quest for a curriculum. Thus the problem – contents which will make up the curriculum on which the Subjects will carry out the gnosiological action cannot be chosen by one or the other of the dialogical poles in isolation. If it were so, and, unfortunately, this is how it is seen (usually that the choice of direction falls exclusively on the educator), the task of education would take a vertical, donating, ‘aiding’ form from the beginning,187 diagnoses Freire. If the task of drawing up the technical-aid program falls exclusively on the agronomists and the teams they work with – without taking into account the peasants’ critical perception of their reality, even if s/he is up to date with the most urgent problems in the rural area in which s/he is going to work, s/he will tend toward the 227

CHAPTER 3

cultural invasion. It is frequently observed that the peasants, in spite of the magical background of their culture, show considerable empirical knowledge about the basic problems of agricultural techniques… if the dialectics of education and its gnosiological aspect are taken into consideration, it is impossible to dispense with a preliminary knowledge of the aspirations, the levels of perception, the view of the world which the educatees (in this case the peasants) have. With this knowledge as a starting point, the educational curriculum can be organized to include a group of themes on which the educator and the educatee as Subjects in the knowing process can use their ability to know.188 To know the peasants’ manner of seeing the world which contains their ‘generative themes’ (which after being taken, studied, and placed in a scientific setting, are returned to the peasants in the form of problem themes) implies a search . This in turn requires a methodology which should be dialogical, problemposing and conscientizing. Research into generative, themes, and education as a gnosiological condition, are different stages of the same process. If one offers the peasants their own theme, so that in the act of knowing they can begin a dialogue on it with the educator (whether an agronomist or not) it will ‘generate’ other themes when, at a later stage, it is manifested in its relationship with other related themes through the transformation undergone by the perception of reality. Thus one passes from a stage which tends mainly towards the search for the ‘generative themes’ to another whose tendency is mainly educational-gnosiological. At the same time, as the comprehension of reality is being heightened through the act of knowing, a new theme is being sought out.189 Thus the content of education springs from the peasants themselves and their relations with the world, and transforms and broadens itself as the world becomes revealed to them. The ‘research groups’ are prolonged into ‘cultural discussion groups’. These in turn require new educational contents of different standards which demand further thematic research. This state of dialectic generates a dynamic which transcends the static character of the naive conception of education, which is mere ‘transmission’ of knowledge. Hence, action based on it is the complete opposite of the action which consists merely of the extension of the contents which have been selected by one of its poles.190 Technical aid, which is indispensable in any sphere, is only valid when its curriculum which grows out of the search for ‘generative themes’ of the people, goes beyond pure technical instruction. …Technical aid, of which proficiency capacitation is a part, can only exist through praxis, if it is to be genuine. It exists in action and reflection and in the critical comprehension of the implications of method.191 Given that we can count on various groups of peasants in a certain area, says Freire, who are prepared to participate in a course of technical proficiency capacitation and whose ‘thematic universe’ we already know, what do we do and how do we act? The ‘treatment’ of the theme researched considers the ‘reduction’ and the ‘codification’ of the themes which make up the program as a structure, that is, as a system of relationships in which one theme leads obligatorily to others, all joined in units and sub-units within the program.192 228


Thematic ‘codifications’ are the representations of existential situations – situations of work in the fields where the peasants are using some less efficient methods of working; situations representing scenes apparently dissociated from technical processes and yet which have some relation to them etc. The interlocutor – subjects, faced with a pedagogical ‘codification’ (problem-situation), which represents a given existential situation, concentrate on it, seeking through dialogue the significant comprehension of its meaning. Since this is a gnosiological condition in which the knowable object is the existential situation represented in it, it is not the role of the educators to narrate to the educatees (the peasants) what in their opinion constitutes their knowledge of reality or of the technical dimension involved in it. On the contrary, their task is to challenge the peasants once again to penetrate the significance of the thematic content with which they are confronted.193 The codification represents an existential situation, a situation ‘lived’ by the peasants, which they either do not ‘enter into’ in the process of living it, or if they do, their ‘entering into’ is merely being aware of the situation. The de-coding, as an act of knowing, allows them to ‘enter-into’ their own prior perceptions of their reality. De-coding is thus a dialectical moment in time, in which the consciousness concentrated on the challenge of the codification, rebuilds its power of reflection in the ‘entering into’ of the present understanding which progresses towards a new understanding. Through this process, the peasants progressively recognize that it is they who transform the world,194 concludes Freire. Although at times, Freire’s explanation of the process of knowing – particularly of the peasants – is verbose and complicated, excessively influenced by Sartre’s existential analysis of consciousness, its intentionality etc., on the whole the point that he wanted to make – the task of taking the peasants into active consideration in the process of transformation of the society, in fact, giving the peasant the centrestage and portraying the educator as facilitator, and a co-participant, is a brilliant departure from hitherto theorized and practiced method of development communication, often termed as extension. PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

The book was first published in English in the USA by The Continuum Publishing Company in 1970.It was later published by Penguin Books. This edition, on which this critique is based, was published in 1996, and contains the publisher’s foreword on the occasion of the twentieth year of the book’s publication in the United States. It is worth noting here the publisher’s view. He says, ‘Since the original publication, this revolutionary work has gone into more than a score of printings and sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.’195 The publisher then quotes from the foreword by Richard Schaull written on the occasion of the first edition which had the following remark ‘…..I consider the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an English edition to be something of an event.’196 These words have proved prophetic, says the publisher. He then goes on to explain the relevance of the book for the technologically advanced society as well. The publisher also informs us that the translation has been modified to reflect the 229

CHAPTER 3

connection between liberation and inclusive language. It was a necessity felt by Freire himself. However, there are occasions, even in this book, where the same language modification has not been carried out. Other publishers, we believe, should also modify the language – not only the gender-biased language but racial expressions like ‘niggardly’197 etc. The foreword by Richard Schaull is truly prophetic. He says, taking cue from Freire, ‘Education is once again a subversive force.’198 Dwelling on Freire’s childhood experiences, he says at one point, ‘it also led him to make a vow, at age eleven, to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger, so that other children would not have to know the agony he was experiencing.’199 While dealing with Freire’s philosophy, Schaull writes, ‘He has made use of the insights of these men (“Sartre and Mounier, Erich Fromm and Louis Althusser, Ortega y Gasset and Mao, Martin Luther King and Che Guevara, Unamuno and Marcuse”) to develop a perspective on education which is authentically his own and which seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America.’200 Writes Schaull further, ‘In this brief introduction, there is no point in attempting to sum up, in a few paragraphs, what the author develops in a number of pages. That would be an offense to the richness, depth and complexity of his thought. But perhaps a word of witness has its place here – a personal witness as to why I find a dialogue with the thought of Paulo Freire an exciting adventure. Fed up as I am with the abstractness and sterility of so much intellectual work in academic circles today, I am excited by a process of reflection which is set in a thoroughly historical context, which is carried on in the midst of a struggle to create a new social order and thus represents a new unity of theory and praxis. And I am encouraged when a man of the stature of Paulo Freire incarnates a rediscovery of the humanizing vocation of the intellectual, and demonstrates the power of thought to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future.’201 Schaull concludes his foreword with the following observation: ‘There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom”, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society. But it could also contribute to the formation of a new man (and woman) and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history. For those who are committed to that task and are searching for concepts and tools for experimentation, Paulo Freire’s thought will make a significant contribution in the years ahead.’202 Paulo Freire wrote a preface for this book .He wrote, ‘These pages, which introduce Pedagogy of the Oppressed, result from my observations during six years of political exile, observations which have enriched those previously afforded by my educational activities in Brazil.’203 He further said, ‘Thought and study alone did not produce Pedagogy of the Oppressed; it is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of laborers (peasant or urban) and of middle class persons 230


whom I have observed directly or indirectly during the course of my educative work. Continued observation will afford me an opportunity to modify or to corroborate in later studies the points proposed in this introductory work.’204 Freire continues further, ‘This volume will probably arouse negative reactions in a number of readers. Some will regard my position vis-à-vis the problem of human liberation as purely idealistic, or may even consider discussion of an ontological vocation, love, dialogue, hope, humility, and sympathy as so much reactionary “blah”. Others will not (or will not wish to) accept denunciation of a state of oppression that gratifies the oppressors. Accordingly, this admittedly tentative work is for radicals. I am certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or in whole, will continue reading to the end. But the reader who dogmatically assumes closed, “irrational” positions will reject the dialogue I hope this book will open.’205 Very significant is his concluding remark too: ‘Here I would like to express my gratitude to Elza, my wife and “first reader”, for the understanding and encouragement she has shown my work, which belongs to her as well.’206 Chapter 1: The Justification for a Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire writes, ‘While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.’207 The reader may note an indirect reference to Sartre’s ‘negatite’ in this formulation of ‘uncompleted being’.208 ‘But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives,’ says Freire, ‘only the first is the people’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.’209 These observations of Freire are crucial to an understanding of his thoughts. Five hundred years of colonial and post-colonial oppression in Brazil which he studied during his educational work and his opposition to it (which cost him dearly) and his activities in Chile where he found the class struggle taken to an extraordinary height (particularly in the years of Allende), convinced him of the justness of the struggle as well as the unjust social system that invariably puts a spanner on it. We should also not lose sight of the influence of existentialist philosophy, especially of Sartre as expressed in the ‘real alternatives’ of choosing one or the other.’210 Freire writes, ‘Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way), those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs 231

CHAPTER 3

within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.’211 Freire clarifies further, ‘Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so .In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn the oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.’212 This is a question of ethics. The oppressed must have ethics on their side in order not to commit the same misdeeds as were done by the oppressors. He continues, ‘This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only the power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.’213 This formulation has been made, we suppose, due to an influence of Karl Marx. Marx, while dealing with the alienation of the working class, said, ‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self-alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power: it has in it a semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. In the words of Hegel, the class of the proletariat is in abasement indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, decisive and comprehensive negation of that nature’. ‘Within this anti-thesis the private owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian, the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter, that of annihilating it.’214 Please also note the following observation of Marx: ‘Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No’. ‘The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders’. ‘The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.’215 It goes without saying that the role of the oppressed in Freire is similar to the role of the proletariat envisaged by Marx — in both cases the oppressed/the proletariat has to liberate itself as also the class dominating and oppressing it. 232


Freire asks, ‘Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society?’,216 and answers, ‘They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of their necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity.’217 Two important points are worth noting here. One is the recognition of the necessity to fight. The other is the concept of love. Recognition of necessity is an well-known concept in Marxist epistemology in which it is defined as freedom. Engels says that Hegel was the first to state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him freedom is the recognition of necessity’. The concept of love, on the other hand, has been derived from existentialism and christiality. We believe it is a Heideggerian influence. Heidegger said, ‘Dasein is either authentically or inauthentically disclosed to itself, and in such a way, indeed, that this understanding does not merely get something in its grant, but makes up the existential-Being of its factical potentiality-for-Being. This Being which is disclosed is that of an entity, of which this Being is an issue. The meaning of this Being – that is, of care – is what makes care possible in its constitution, and it is what makes up primordially the Being of this potentiality-for-Being’. Heideggerian care is very akin to Freirean love.218 Though influenced by Engels and Heidegger, Freire had the concepts stand on their own feet like independent entities, supporting his theory of humanization and dehumanization. Freire says, ‘But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors or sub-oppressors. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of ‘adhesion’ to the oppressor.”219 Freire said in the preface that these thoughts emanated out of his concrete experiences of educational activities in Chile and Brazil. No doubt it is true. We have historical evidences also. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” we are acquainted with the character of a notorious torturer of the blacks who was a black himself. In fact, the oppressed is a dual personality. On one hand, he/she opposes oppression. On the other hand, the oppressor is the ideal which he/she aspires to be. Many eminent figures in the revolutionary movements show this duality both during and after the revolution. Freire says further, ‘It is a rare peasant who, once promoted to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself.’220 ‘Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend — conditioned 233

CHAPTER 3

by the myths of the old order – to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.’221 Thus Freire interprets this phenomenon. Freire then introduces a novel concept called ‘fear of freedom’, which is known to us as an experience but which has been theoretically posited by Freire. He says, ‘The “fear of freedom” which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of an oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness. Thus the behaviour of the oppressed is a prescribed behaviour, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.’222 He further adds, ‘The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Fredom is acquired by conguest not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of human beings; nor is it an idea which becomes a myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completeness.’223 Needless to mention that Freire here subscribes to Sartre’s concept of freedom. From his earlier statement that Freedom is the recognition of necessity (which he adopted from Marxism), he now defines freedom as the indispensable condition for the quest for human completeness. This is a Sartrian concept. Regarding the aim of the book, Freire says, ‘This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.’224 Some fundamental questions may be posed at this stage. If this book is the pedagogy of the oppressed, then don’t we have to know who are the oppressed? Is there any class analysis of the oppressed? To which class do they belong? Secondly, if it is a pedagogy of their liberation, then what is this pedagogy constituted of? Is it a guide to their struggle? Thirdly, who are the pedagogues? Are they class leaders? Are they formerly middle-class, now declassed, leaders? Or are they educators with a mission? Freire says, ‘In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.’225 Freire further adds,’ ‘the oppressed must confront reality critically………A mere perception of reality not followed by …critical intervention will not lead to a transformation of objective reality – precisely because it is not a true perception.’226 Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them, says Freire. ‘So often 234


do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing, and are incapable of learning anything — that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive — that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness.’227 This is a profound insight and finds corroboration in psychology and politics. ‘Almost never do they realize that they, too, “know things” they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men.’228 If extrapolated to the context of the colonized and formely colonized nations, the same psychology pervades. The colonized or formerly colonized man or woman belonging to a dependent or colonized country, self-depreciates his or her worth and knowledge and looks up to the dominating nation as the depository of all knowledge. Freire himself used the macro-mentality of the nation in his book Cultural Action for Freedom, since national mentality is the expression of the sum-total of individual mentality. The oppressed, who have been shaped by the death-affirming climate of oppression, must find, says Freire, through their struggle the way to life-affirming humanization, which does not lie simply in having more to eat (although it does involve having more to eat and cannot fail to include this aspect). The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This a radical requirement. They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become human beings.229 The struggle begins, says Freire further, with men’s (and women’s) recognition that they have been destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation — all arms of domination — cannot be instruments of their rehumanization .The only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of a dialogue with the oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy, the method ceases to be an instrument by which the teachers (in this instance, the revolutionary leadership) can manipulate the students (in this instance, the oppressed), because it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves.230 Now Freire quotes from an unpublished manuscript of Alvaro Vieira Pinto ‘The method is, in fact, the external form of consciousness manifest in acts, which takes on the fundamental property of consciousness — its intentionality. The essence of consciousness is being with the world, and this behaviour is permanent and unavoidable. Accordingly, consciousness is in essence ‘a way towards’ something apart from itself, outside itself, which surrounds it and which it apprehends by means of its ideational capacity. Consciousness is thus, by definition, a method, in the most general sense of the word.’231 This is Sartrean concept of consciousness. Freire says, ‘A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice cointentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle of their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudoparticipation, but committed involvement.’232 As we have observed earlier, Freire has used a concept of Sartre quite logically in the context of adult education. 235

CHAPTER 3

Chapter 2: The Banking Concept of Education ‘A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.’233, says Freire. ‘The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power.’234 Freire is introducing here the transforming power of words. Narration leads the students to memorise mechanically, the narrated content. It turns them into “containers”, into “receptacles”, to be “filled” by the teacher. …. Education thus becomes an act of depositing …..Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués. …This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits… But in the last analysis, says Freire, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge… Freire concludes thus; ‘For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’235 In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift, says Freire, bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself/herself to the students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he/she justifies his/her own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying their teacher’s existence — but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate their teacher. The raison d’etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacherstudent contradiction, by reconciling the poles of contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.236 The argument against banking concept of education is well-founded. But here we want to put a word of caution. Immediately thereafter, referring to the projection of absolute ignorance onto others as the characteristic of the teacher in the banking concept, Freire brings forth the analogy of the ideology of oppression alluding to the role of the masters of the erstwhile Brazilian society counterposing the student as an alienated being like the slave, taking cue from Hegel. This line of argument will expose Freire open to adverse criticism that in the Freirean banking concept of education the teacher is analogous to the oppressor or his/her accomplice and the student is the oppressed. The banking concept of education, says Freire, regards human beings as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their 236


intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of the reality deposited in them.237 The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.238 This formulation of Freire is universally true whether by students we consider the oppressed adult illiterates or the middle class student community, who, in spite of their class background, have often been found to show revolutionary zeal to negate the reality of oppression. ‘Indeed’, says Freire, ‘the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”.’239 It is a change in the opposite direction which would induce the oppressed to accept the reality as given and unchangeable save and except some cosmetic changes permissible in a “paternalistic” “welfare” state. Real structural social transformations, says Freire, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao’.240 The banking approach to adult education, for example, says Freire, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. He further says, ‘the “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons — the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.’241 This notion of being more fully human is a Sartrian existentialist concept, as pointed out earlier. Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), says Freire, fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about the reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate the reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.242 ‘But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize’, comments Freire. ‘From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.’243 This is a very important role of the educator-liberator. 237

CHAPTER 3

‘Implicit in the banking concept’ says Freire, ‘is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, and not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.’244 This formulation is open to criticism. No one can be assumed to be in the world and not with it. ‘It follows logically’ says Freire, ‘from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. The teacher’s task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to “fill” the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.’245 Here Freire adds in a footnote, ‘The concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the “digestive” or “nutritive” concept of education, in which knowledge is “fed” by the teacher to the students to “fill them out”.’246 Freire adds further, ‘The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his/her hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one’s students. Solidarity requires true communication…’247 He elaborates further, ‘only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.’248 ‘Because banking of education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls “biophily”, but instead produces its opposite: “necrophily” says Freire. “…….Oppression — overwhelming control — is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialised view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects.It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.”’249 Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made, says Freire, in the naïve hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use the banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society.250 Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the 238


educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world… “Problem-posing” education, responding to the essence of consciousness – intentionality – rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split” — consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.251 The whole explanation is derived from various shades of existentialism — Sartrian — as is evident from expressions like intentionality, Heideggerian from the expressions such as authenticity and inauthenticity, and Jasperian as evident from the “split” referred to. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, says Freire, not transferals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors — teacher on one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations — indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object-are otherwise impossible.252 Problem-posing education which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacherstudent with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, and who, in turn, while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher.253 This formulation of Freire is reminiscent of Minkowsky’s formulation with regard to space and time and equally revolutionary. Minkowsky said: The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.254 Freire further clarifies: ‘The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student: she is not “cognitive” at one point and “narrative” at another. She is always “cognitive”, whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students — no longer docile listeners — are now critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, 239

CHAPTER 3

together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.’255 Education as the practice of freedom — as opposed to education as the practice of domination — denies that a human being is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from the people. Authentic reflection considers neither an abstract human being nor the world without people, but peoples in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it, says Freire.256 Here we find Freire heavily influenced by Sartre. Sartre’s idea of the world as intimately connected with human beings with the proposition that the world becomes meaningless and incomprehensible without humans and ceases to exist as such is open to critical reflection from the points of view of sciences and humanities. Freire’s concern is, of course, the relationship between human beings and the world. Without going into any detail, it may be observed that the logic of Freire’s arguments only emphasizes his concern for and the primacy of the human being. In problem-posing education, says Freire, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived, (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence the teacher-students and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.257 Problem-posing education, iterates Freire, affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming – an unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.258 This dialectical relationship between a reality in the process of transformation through constant interaction and intervention of an ever-becoming humanity necessitates a kind of education which takes cognizance of both. ‘Education,’ says Freire, “is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become. Its ‘duration’ (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of the opposites permanence and change.”259 Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence it is prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with 240


the movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion — an historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective, explains Freire.260 The movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization — the people’s historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he/she prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men’s having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others’ having, must not consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.261 Thus Freire clarifies being and having. Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality. The world — no longer something to be described with deceptive words — becomes the object of that transforming action by men and women which results in their humanization.262 Thus Freire brilliantly connects the concept of humanization with the idea of socialistic principles of possession. He also introduces the relationship between the word and the action for transformation of society, the watchwords being emancipation and humanization. Chapter 3: Dialogics: The Essence of Education as the Practice of Freedom Freire says: ‘As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus to speak a true word is to transform the world.’263 Freire further emphasizes, ‘Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn, reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.’264 These are profound statements pregnant with wisdom and are coming from the depth of heart, like all true words. But while to say the true word – which is work, which is praxis – is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone – nor can she say it 241

CHAPTER 3

for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words, says Freire.265 Readers will notice that Freire borrows the concept of naming from Sartre (see his autobiographical work Words)266 But he has embellished the concept profoundly, by adding new dimension to it. Freire asserts, ‘Dialogue is the encounter between human beings, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming – between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent this continuation of this dehumanizing aggression’.267 Freire further says,: ‘If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s” “depositing” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants.268 Thus Freire fits in all the constitutive elements of his proposition within the concept of dialogue. Now Freire enumerates the conditions which make a true dialogue possible. Freire says, ‘Dialogue cannot exist in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and recreation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated.’269 In this context, Freire quotes Che Guevara: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”270 Freire qualifies dialogue. He says, ‘…..dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance.’271 Dialogue, says Freire, further ‘requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and recreate, faith in their vocation to be fully human…’272 Summing up these prerequisites of dialogue, Freire says, ‘Founding itself upon love, humility and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms if dialogue – loving, humble, and full of faith – did not produce this climate of mutual trust, which leads the dialoguers into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world.’273 Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in human beings’ incompletion, from which they move out in constant search – a search which can be carried out only in communion with others.’274 Finally, concludes Freire, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking – thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the 242


world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them – thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity – thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved.275 Only dialogue, says Freire, which requires critical thinking, is capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication and without communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between the teacher and the student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated.276 Combining dialogue, communication and education, Freire says, ‘..the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about. And preoccupation with the content of a dialogue is really preoccupation with the program content of education.277 Freire elaborates: ‘The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contradictions, we must pose this existential, concrete, present situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response – not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of action.’278 ‘We must realize that’, says Freire, ‘their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political actions which are not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert.’279 Freire presents the concept of generative theme in this context. He says, ‘It is to the reality which mediates human beings, and to the perception of that reality held by the educators and the people, that we must go to find the program content of education. The investigation of what I have termed the people’s “thematic universe” – the complex of their generating themes – inaugurates the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom. The methodology of that investigation must likewise be dialogical, affording the opportunity both to discover generating themes and to stimulate the people’s awareness in regard to these themes. Consistent with the liberating purpose of dialogical education, the object of the investigation is not persons (as if they were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language with which men and women refer to the reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world, in which their generative themes are found.’280 Freire adds, ‘…the people – aware of their activity and the world in which they are situated, acting in function of the objectives which they propose, having the seat of their decisions located in themselves and in their relations with the world and with others, infusing the world with their creative presence by means of the transformation they effect upon it …not only live but exist; and their existence is historical….humans exist in a world which they are constantly re-recreating and transforming.’281 ‘Humans, however,’ says Freire, ‘because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world, – because they are conscious beings – exist in a dialectical relationship 243

CHAPTER 3

between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world, which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the “limit-situations”. Once perceived by individuals as fetters, as obstacles to their liberation, these situations stand out in relief from the background, revealing their true nature as concrete historical dimensions of a given reality. Men and women respond to the challenge with actions …. “limit acts”: those directed at negating and overcoming, rather than passively accepting, the “given”.282 These concepts, though presented in a different way, closely resembles the Marxist concept of freedom. Engels says that Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility which is thus given of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men and women themselves – two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freire elaborates, ‘…it is not the limit situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men and women to attempt to overcome the limitsituations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the concrete, historical reality in which limit-situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear, which in turn will evoke new limit-acts.’283 ‘It is as transforming and creative beings’ says Freire, ‘that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods – tangible objects – but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts. Through their continuing praxis, men and women simultaneously create history and become historical- social beings. Because… people can tri-dimensionalize time into the past, the present, and the future, their history, in function of their own creations, develops as a constant process of transformation within which epochal units materialize. These epochal units are not closed periods of time, static compartments within which people are confined ….epochal units inter-relate in the dynamics of historical continuity.’284 Freire elaborates: ‘An epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving towards plenitude. The concrete representation of many of these ideas, values, concepts and hopes, as well as the obstacles which impede the people’s full humanization, constitute the themes of that epoch. These themes imply others which are opposing or even antithetical; they also indicate tasks to be carried out and fulfilled. Thus, historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites. Nor can these themes be found anywhere except in the human-world relationship. The complex of interacting themes of an epoch constitutes its “thematic universe”.285 244


‘…the themes both contain and are contained in limit-situations; the tasks they imply require limit-acts’, says Freire. ‘When the themes are concealed by the limit situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks –– people’s responses in the form of historical action – can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled. In this situation, humans are unable to transcend the limit-situations to discover that beyond these situations – and in contradiction to them –– lies an untested feasibility.’286 Freire concludes: ‘limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limitsituation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo. Consequently, liberating actions upon an historical milieu must correspond not only to the generating themes but to the way in which these themes are perceived. This requirement in turn implies another: the investigation of meaningful thematics’.287 Freire explains the constitutive elements of generating themes. He says, ‘Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from general to the particular. The broadest epochal unit, which includes a diversified range of units and sub-units – continental, regional, national and so forth – contains themes of a universal character. I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination – which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved. It is this tormenting theme which gives our epoch the anthropological character mentioned earlier. In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of the dehumanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which the people are reduced to things.’288 Freire explains further, ‘Within the smaller circles, we find themes and limitsituation characteristic of societies (on the same continent or on different continents) which through these themes and limit- situations share historical similarities. For example, underdevelopment, which cannot be understood apart from the relationship of dependency, represents a limit-situation characteristic of societies of the Third World. The task implied by this limit-situation is to overcome the contradictory relation of these “object” societies to the metropolitan societies; this task constitutes the untested feasibility of the Third World.’289 Freire elaborates: ‘… a dominated consciousness which has not yet perceived a limit-situation in its totality apprehends only its epiphenomena and transfers to the latter the inhibiting force which is the property of the limit-situation. This fact is of great importance for the investigation of generative themes. When people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality. To truly know it, they would have to reverse their starting point: they would need to have a total vision of the context in order subsequently to 245

CHAPTER 3

separate and isolate its constituent elements and by means of this analysis achieve a clearer perception of the whole’.290 Freire further explains: ‘Equally appropriate for the methodology of thematic investigation and for problem-posing education is this effort to present significant dimensions of an individual’s contextual reality, the analysis of which will make it possible for him/her to recognize the interaction of the various components. Meanwhile, the significant dimensions, which in their turn are constituted of parts in interaction, should be perceived as dimensions of total reality. In this way, a critical analysis of a significant existential dimension makes possible a new, critical attitude towards the limit-situations. The perception and comprehension of reality are rectified and acquire new depth. When carried out with a methodology of conscientizacao the investigation of the generative theme contained in the minimum thematic universe (the generative themes in interaction) thus introduces or begins to introduce women and men to a critical form of thinking about their world.’291 ‘In the event, however, that human beings perceive reality as dense, impenetrable, and enveloping’, says Freire, ‘it is indispensable to proceed with the investigation by means of abstraction. This method does not involve reducing the concrete to the abstract (which would signify the negation of its dialectical nature), but rather maintaining both elements as opposites which interrelate dialectically in the act of reflection. This dialectical movement of thought is exemplified perfectly in the analysis of a concrete existential, “coded” situation. Its “decoding” requires moving from the abstract to the concrete; this requires moving from the part to the whole and then returning to the parts; this in turn requires that the Subject recognizes himself/herself in the object (the coded concrete existential situation) and recognizes the object as a situation in which he/she finds himself/herself, together with other Subjects. If the decoding is well done, this movement of flux and reflux from the abstract to the concrete which occurs in the analysis of a coded situation leads to the supersedence of the abstraction by the critical perception of the concrete, which has already ceased to be a dense, impenetrable reality.’292 Freire adds, ‘When an individual is presented with a coded existential situation (a sketch or photograph which leads by abstraction to the concreteness of existential reality), his/her tendency is to “split” that coded situation. In the process of decoding, this separation corresponds to the stage we call the “description of the situation”, and facilitates the discovery of the interaction among the parts of the disjointed whole. This whole (the coded situation), which previously had been only diffusely apprehended, begins to acquire meaning as thought flows back to it from the various dimensions. Since, however, the coding is the representation of an existential situation, the decoder tends to take the step from the representation to the very concrete situation in which and with which she finds herself. It is thus possible to explain conceptually why individuals begin to behave differently with regard to objective reality, once that reality has ceased to look like a blind alley and has taken on its true aspect: a challenge which human beings must meet.’293 ‘In all the stages of decoding,’ says Freire, ‘people exteriorize their view of the world. And in the way they think about and face the world – fantastically, 246


dynamically, or statically – their generative themes may be found. A group which does not concretely express a generative thematics – a fact which might appear to imply the non-existence of themes – is, on the contrary, suggesting a very dramatic theme: the theme of silence. The theme of silence suggests a structure of mutism in the face of the overwhelming force of the limit-situations’.294 Freire further states, ‘We must realize that the aspirations, the motives, and the objectives implicit in the meaningful thematics are human aspirations, motives, and objectives. They do not exist “out there” somewhere, as static entities; they are occurring. They are as historical as human beings themselves; consequently, they cannot be apprehended apart from them. To apprehend these themes and to understand them is to understand both the people who embody them and the reality to which they refer. But – precisely because it is not possible to understand these themes apart from people – it is necessary that those concerned understand them as well. Thematic investigation thus becomes a common striving towards awareness of reality and towards self-awareness, which makes this investigation a starting point for the educational process or for cultural action of a liberating character.’295 Thematic investigation, which occurs in the realm of the human, cannot be reduced to a mechanical act, emphasizes Freire. As a process of search, of knowledge, and thus of creation, it requires the investigators to discover the interpenetration of problems, in the linking of meaningful themes. The investigation will be most educational when it is most critical, and most critical when it avoids the narrow outlines of partial or “focalized” views of reality, and sticks to the comprehension of total reality. Thus, the process of searching for the meaningful thematics should include a concern for the links between themes, a concern to pose these themes as problems, and a concern for their historical-cultural context.296 Freire reiterates, ‘the investigation of thematics involves the investigation of the people’s thinking – thinking which occurs only in and among people together seeking out reality. I cannot think for others or without others, nor can others think for me. Even if the people’s thinking is superstitious or naïve, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in action that they can change. Producing and acting upon their own ideas – not consuming those of others – must constitute that process.’297 Reflection upon situationality, says Freire, is reflection about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means of which people discover each other to be “in a situation”. Only as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley, and they can come to perceive it as an objective-problematic situation – only then can commitment exist. Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality – historical awareness itself – thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientizacao of the situation. Conscientizacao is the deepening of the attitude characteristic of all emergence.298 In contrast with the anti-dialogical and non-communicative “deposits” of the banking method of education, says Freire, the program content of the 247

CHAPTER 3

problem-posing method – dialogical par excellence – is constituted and organized by the students’ view of the world, where their own generative themes are found. The content thus constantly expands and renews itself. The task of the dialogical teacher in an interdisciplinary team working on the thematic universe revealed by their investigation is to “re-present” that universe to the people from whom she or he first received it – and “re-present” it not as a lecture but as a problem.299 In the context of adult education, Freire proposes the following scheme: ‘Let us say, for example, that a group has the responsibility of coordinating a plan for adult education in a peasant area with a high percentage of illiteracy. The plan includes a literacy campaign and a post-literacy phase. During the former stage, problemposing education seeks out and investigate the “generative word”; in the post-literacy stage, it seeks out and investigates the “generative theme”.’300 The concept elaborated above, particularly epoch and limit-situation are heavily influenced by Marxian Thought. While discussing his present work in the first part of this chapter we dwelt on the concept of epoch in Marxian vocabulary. Limitsituation is also borrowed from the Marxian concept where freedom is only achieved once necessity is understood. As recognition of necessity is not achieved, it is considered as an obstacle. But once the raison d’etive is deciphered, it no longer is presented as an obstacle but as the natural consequence which can be overcome by understanding the laws of nature. The same laws would enable the humans to find out how to overcome the limit-situation. Take for example, the concept of gravity. As human beings were unware of the law, they could not overcome it. Once the limitsituation was deciplened, it could be negated by another natural law which is connected with an opposite action. Thus aeroplanes and sputniks were possible in an era in which the law of gravitation could be mastered first and then negated. Chapter 4: Antidialogics and Dialogics Freire says “…human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action.”301 Freire quotes Lenin to prove his point. Freire further says, in the context of people’s movement, ‘The leaders do bear the responsibility for coordination and at times, direction – but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis. By imposing their word on others, they falsify that word and establish a contradiction between their methods and their objectives. If they are truly committed to liberation, their action and reflection cannot proceed without the action and reflection of others.”302 This is a very vital comment on revolutionary actions. In many instances, the leaders impose their will on the cadres and the people. This denial of true democracy in the organization makes the revolutionary organization equally insensitive like the system they seek to replace. Both Lenin and Mao contemplated Cultural Revolution which would seek to purge the revolutionary organization of undemocratic practices. However, the practice calls for real innovation. In the name of democracy in China the country was engulfed by anarchism of the worst kind, during the Cultural Revolution. 248


Freire further says, manipulation, sloganizing, “depositing”, regimentation and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis.303 Therefore, Freire says, ‘revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not truly revolutionary; or they are totally misguided in their conception of their role, and, prisoners of their own sectarianism, are equally non-revolutionary. They may even reach power. But the validity of any revolution resulting from antidialogical actions is thoroughly doubtful.’304 ‘It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasing critical awareness of their role as Subjects of the transformation. If they are drawn into the process as ambiguous beings, partly themselves and partly the oppressors housed within – and if they come to power still embodying that ambiguity imposed on them by the situation of oppression – it is my contention that they will merely imagine they have reached power,’ observers Freire.305 Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution, says Freire. This is what makes it a revolution, as distinguished from a military coup.306 It would indeed be idealistic to affirm that, opines Freire, by merely reflecting on oppressive reality and discovering their status as objects, persons have thereby already become Subjects. But while this perception in and of itself does not mean that thinkers have become Subjects, it does mean … that they are ‘Subjects’ in expectancy – an expectancy which leads them to seek to solidify their new status.307 The dominant elites … can – and do – think without the people – although they do not permit themselves the luxury of failing to think about the people in order to know them better and thus dominate them more efficiently. Consequently, any apparent dialogue or communication between the elites and the masses is really the depositing of “communiqués”, whose contents are intended to exercise a domesticating influence, says Freire.308 The same is not true, however, of revolutionary leaders; if they do not think with the people, they become devitalized. The people are their constituent matrix, not mere objects thought of. Although revolutionary leaders may also have to think about the people in order to understand them better, this thinking differs from that of the elite; for in thinking about the people in order to liberate (rather than dominate) them, the leaders give of themselves to the thinking of the people. One is thinking of the master; the other is the thinking of the comrade, explains Paulo.309 In the process of oppression, the elites subsist on the “living death” of the oppressed and find their authentication in the vertical relationship between themselves and the latter; in the revolutionary process there is only one way for the emerging leaders to achieve authenticity; they must “die”, in order to be reborn through and with the oppressed, declares Freire.310 This is a very significant statement having wide-ranging connotations .It is synonymous to the process of being declassed. We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings 249

CHAPTER 3

in communion liberate each other. This affirmation is not meant to undervalue the importance of revolutionary leaders but, on the contrary, to emphasize their value. What could be more important than to live and work with the oppressed, with the rejects of life”, with “the wretched of the earth”? In this communion, the revolutionary leaders should find not only their raison d’etre but a motive for rejoicing. By their very nature, revolutionary leaders can do what the dominant elites –– by their very nature – are unable to do in authentic terms, says Freire.311 Some well-intentioned but misguided persons suppose that since the dialogical process is prolonged, (which incidentally is not true), observes Freire, they ought to carry out the revolution without communication, by means of “communiques”, and that once the revolution is won, they will then develop a thoroughgoing educational effort. They further justify this procedure by saying that it is not possible to carry out education – liberating education – before taking power.312 It is worth analyzing some fundamental points of the above assertions, says Freire. These men and women (or most of them) believe in the necessity for dialogue with the people, but do not believe this dialogue is feasible prior to taking over power. When they deny the possibility that the leaders can behave in a critically educational fashion before taking power, they deny the revolution’s educational quality as cultural action preparing to become cultural revolution. On the other hand, they confuse cultural action with the new education to be inaugurated once power is taken.313 Freire further emphasises this point. He says, ‘because the revolution undeniably has an educational nature, in the sense that unless it liberates it is not revolution, the taking of power is only one moment – no matter how decisive – in the revolutionary process. As process, the “before” of the revolution is located within the oppressor society and is apparent only to the revolutionary consciousness’.314 Dialogue with the people, says Freire, is neither a concession nor a gift, much less a tactic to be used for domination. Dialogue, as the encounter among human beings to “name” the world, is a fundamental precondition for their true humanization.315 Because liberating action is dialogical in nature, dialogue cannot be a posteriori to that action, but must be concomitant with it. And since liberation must be a permanent condition, dialogue becomes a continuing aspect of liberating action, Freire points out.316 Freire further says, ‘It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors’ depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a “free society”; the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don’t like the boss they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur ––worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university ; the myth of the equality of all individuals ......the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes 250


as defenders of “Western Christian civilization” against “materialist barbarism”; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites ...the myth that rebellion is a sin against God; the myth of private property as fundamental to personal human development. All these myths, says Freire, are presented to them by well-organized propaganda and slogans, via the mass “communications” media – as if such communications constituted real communication!317 One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive propfessionals who are involved is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality. In “community development” projects the more a region or area is broken down into “local communities”, without the study of these communities both as totalities in themselves and as parts of another totality (the area, region, and so forth) – which in its turn is part of a still larger totality (the nation, as part of the continental totality) – the more alienation is intensified. And the more alienated the people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided. These focalized forms of action, by intensifying the focalized way of life of the oppressed (especially in rural areas), hamper the oppressed from perceiving reality critically and keep them isolated from the problems of oppressed women and men in other areas.318 The same divisive effect occurs in connection with the so-called “leadership training courses”, which are (although carried out without any such intention by many of their organizers) in the last analysis alienating, comments Freire.319 People are fulfilled, says Freire, only to the extent that they create their world, (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labour. The fulfilment of humankind as human beings lies, then, in the fulfillment of the world. If for a person to be in the world of work is to be totally dependent, insecure, and permanently threatened – if their work does not belong to them – the person cannot be fulfilled. Work that is not free ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of dehumanisation.320 The reader will note how these thoughts are similar to the concept of alienation proposed by Karl Marx in his book Economic and Political Manuscript of 1844.321 Salvation, says Freire, echoing Marx, can be achieved only with others. To the extent, however, that the elites oppress, they cannot be with the oppressed; for being against them is the essence of oppression.322 Manipulation, says Freire, is another dimension of the theory of antidialogical action.323 Through manipulation, the dominant elites can lead the people into an unauthentic type of “organization” and can thus avoid the threatening alternative: the true organization of the emerged and the emerging people.324 The antidote to manipulation lies in a critically conscious revolutionary organization, which will pose to the people as problems their position in the historical process, the national reality, and manipulation itself.325 In a situation of manipulation, the Left almost always tempted by a “quick return to power”, forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organisation, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites .It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls “realism”, observes Freire critically.326 251

CHAPTER 3

The theory of antidialogical action, says Freire, has one… fundamental characteristic: cultural invasion, which like diverse tactics and manipulation also serves the ends of conquest. In this phenomenon, the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latter’s potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression.327 All domination involves invasion – at times physical and overt, at times camouflaged, with the invader assuming the role of a helping friend. In the last analysis, opines Paulo, invasion is a form of economic and cultural domination. Invasion may be practiced by a metropolitan society upon a dependent society, or it may be implicit in the domination of one class over another within the same society.328 For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority. Since everything has its opposite, if those who are invaded consider themselves inferior, they must necessarily recognize the superiority of the invaders. The values of the latter thereby become the pattern of the former. The more invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them, comments Freire.329 The social ‘I’ of the invaded person, like every social ‘I’, is formed in the sociocultural relations of the social structure, and therefore reflects the duality of the invaded culture. This duality explains why invaded and dominated individuals, at a certain moment of their existential experience, almost “adhere” to the oppressor Thou. The oppressed ‘I’ must break with this near adhesion to the oppressor Thou drawing away from the latter in order to see him more objectively, at which point she critically recognizes herself to be in contradiction with the oppressor. In so doing, he “considers” as a dehumanizing reality the structure in which he is being oppressed. This qualitative change in the perception of the world can only be achieved in the praxis, observes Freire.330 Cultural invasion, says Freire, is on one hand an instrument of domination, and on the other, the result of domination. Thus cultural action of a dominating character (like other forms of dialogical action), in addition to being deliberate and planned, is in another sense simply a product of oppressive reality.331 When, however, at a certain point of their existential experience, says Freire, those who have been invaded begin in one way or another to reject this invasion (to which they might earlier have adapted), the professionals, in order to justify their failure, say that the members of the invaded group are “inferior” because they are “ingrates”, “shiftless”, “diseased”, or” of mixed blood’.332 Professional women and men of any specialty, university graduates or not, are individuals who have been “determined from above” by a culture of domination which has constituted them as dual beings. (If they had come from the lower classes this miseducation would be the same, if not worse). These professionals, however, are necessary to the reorganization of the new society. And since many among them – even though “afraid of freedom” and reluctant to engage in humanizing action – are in truth more misguided than anything else, they not only could be, but ought to be, reclaimed by the revolution, feels Freire.333 252


This reclamation, says Freire, requires that the revolutionary leaders, progressing from what was previously dialogical cultural action, initiate the “cultural revolution.” At this point, revolutionary power moves beyond its role as a necessary obstacle confronting those who wish to negate humanity, and assumes a new and bolder position, with a clear invitation to all who wish to participate in the reconstruction of society. In this sense, “cultural revolution” is a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches power.334 “Cultural revolution” takes the total society to be reconstructed, including all human activities, as the object of its remolding action. Society cannot be reconstructed in a mechanistic fashion; the culture which is culturally recreated through revolution is the fundamental instrument for this reconstruction. “Cultural revolution” is the revolutionary regime’s maximum effort at conscientizacao – it should reach everyone, regardless of their personal path.335 Thus Freire slightly modifies the Marxist implementation of cultural revolution which should take place after the seizure of power. Consequently, this effort at conscientizacao cannot rest content with the technical or scientific training of intended specialists, observes Freire. The new society becomes qualitatively distinct from the old in more than a partial way. Revolutionary society cannot attribute to technology the same ends attributed by the previous society. Accordingly, the training of people in the two societies must also differ. Technical and scientific training need not be inimical to humanistic education as long as science and technology in the revolutionary society are at the service of permanent liberation, of humanization, observes Freire.336 From this point of view, comments Freire, the training of individuals for any occupation (since all occupations occur in time and space) requires the understanding of (a) culture as a superstructure which can maintain “remnants” of the past alive in the substructure undergoing the revolutionary transformation and (b) the occupation itself as an instrument for the transformation of culture. As the cultural revolution deepens conscientizacao in the creative praxis of the new society, people will begin to perceive why mythical remnants of the old society survive in the new. And they will then be able to free themselves more rapidly of these spectres, which, by hindering the edification of a new society, have always constituted a serious problem for every revolution. Through these cultural remnants the oppressor society continues to invade – this time invading the revolutionary society itself.337 For all the above reasons, says Freire, ‘I interpret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in “cultural revolution” once power is taken. In both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientizacao – by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical subjects – is necessary.338 Finally, concludes Freire, cultural revolution develops the practice of permanent dialogues between leaders and people, and consolidates the participation of the people in power. In this way, as both leaders and people continue their critical activity, the revolution will more easily be able to defend itself against bureaucratic tendencies (which lead to new forms of oppression) and against “invasion” (which 253

CHAPTER 3

is always the same). The invader – whether in a bourgeois or in a revolutionary society – may be an agronomist or a sociologist, an economist or a public health engineer, a priest or a pastor, an educator or a social worker – or a revolutionary.339 Cultural invasion further signifies that the ultimate seat of decision regarding the action of those who are invaded lies not with them but with the invaders. And when the power of decision is located outside rather than within the one who should decide, the latter has only the illusion of deciding. This is why there can be no socio-economic development in a dual, “reflex,” invaded society. For development to occur it is necessary: a) that there be a movement of search and creativity having its seat of decision in the searcher; b) that this movement occur not only in space, but in the existential time of the conscious searcher.340 This is a profound assertion. A dependent society cannot develop economically, politically or culturally. Thus, while all development is transformation, not all transformation is development. The transformation occurring in a seed which under favourable conditions germinates and sprouts, is not development. In the same way, the transformation of an animal is not development. The transformations of seeds and animals are determined by the species to which they belong; and they occur in a time which does not belong to them, for time belongs to humankind, says Freire.341 Here we find again an echo of Sartre. It is essential not to confuse modernization with development. The former, although it may affect certain groups in the “satellite society,” is almost always induced; and it is the metropolitan society which derives the true benefits therefrom. A society which is merely modernized without developing will continue – even if it takes over some minimal delegated powers of decision – to depend on the outside country. This is the fate of any dependent society, as long as it remains dependent.342 Here we find Freire’s acceptance of the metropolis-satellite relationship introduced by Andre Gunder Frank.343 The principal contradiction of dual societies is the relationship of dependency between them and the metropolitan society. Once the contradiction has been superseded, the transformation hitherto effected through “aid,” which has primarily benefited the metropolitan society, becomes true development, which benefits the “being for itself”, observes Freire.344 At a certain point in their existential experience, under certain historical conditions, these leaders (Freire refers to the genuine leadership group) renounce the class to which they belong and join the oppressed, in an act of true solidarity (or so one would hope). Whether or not this adherence results from a scientific analysis of reality, it represents (when authentic) an act of love and true commitment. Joining the oppressed requires going to them and communicating with them. The people must find themselves in the emerging leaders, and the latter must find themselves in the people, says Freire.345 The leaders who have emerged necessarily reflect the contradiction of the dominant elites communicated to them by the oppressed, who may not yet, however, clearly perceive their own state of oppression or critically recognize their relationship of antagonism to the oppressors. They may still be in the position previously termed “adhesion” to the oppressor. On the other hand, it is possible that due to certain 254


objective historical conditions they have already reached a relatively clear perception of their state of oppression.346 In the first case, the adhesion – or partial adhesion – of the people to the oppressor makes it impossible for them (to repeat Fanon’s point) to locate him outside themselves. In the second case, they can locate the oppressor and can thus critically recognize their relationship of antagonism to him.347 In the first case, the oppressor is “housed” within the people, and their resulting ambiguity makes them fearful of freedom. They resort (stimulated by the oppressor) to magical explanations or a false view of God, to whom they fatalistically transfer the responsibility for their oppressed state. It is extremely unlikely that these selfmistrustful, downtrodden, hopeless people will seek their own liberation – an act of rebellion which they may view as a disobedient violation of the will of God, as an unwarranted confrontation with destiny. (Hence, the oft-emphasized necessity of posing as problems the myths fed to the people by the oppressors.) In the second case, when the people have reached a relatively clear picture of oppression which leads them to localize the oppressor outside themselves, they take up the struggle to surmount the contradiction in which they are caught. At this moment they overcome the distance between “class necessity” and “class consciousness.”348 In the above formulation of Freire, one will observe his desire to accommodate God within the schemes of social transformation, to use the divine in favour of the oppressed and against the oppressor. This sharing (Freire refers to the relationship of trust between true leaders and the people) in no way diminishes the spirit of struggle, courage, capacity for love, or daring required of the revolutionary leaders. Fidel Castro and his comrades (whom many at the time termed “irresponsible adventurers”), an eminently dialogical leadership group, identified with the people who endured the brutal violence of the Batista dictatorship. This adherence was not easy; it required bravery on the part of the leaders to love the people sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to recommence after each disaster, moved by the undying hope in a future victory which (because forged together with the people) would belong not to the leaders alone, but to the leaders and the people – or to the people, including the leaders.349 Thus, due to certain historical conditions, the movement by the revolutionary leaders to the people is either horizontal – so that leaders and people form one body in contradiction to the oppressor – or it is triangular, with the revolutionary leaders occupying the vertex of the triangle in contradiction to the oppressors and to the oppressed as well. As we have seen, the latter situation is forced on the leaders when the people have not yet achieved a critical perception of oppressive reality.350 This is how Freire interprets the Cuban Revolution which occurred in the most nontraditional way. In the theory of antidialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic) involves a Subject who conquers another person and transforms her or him into a “thing.” In the dialogical theory of action, Subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world. The antidialogical, dominating ‘I’ transforms the dominated, conquered thou into a mere it. The dialogical I, however, knows that it is precisely 255

CHAPTER 3

the ‘thou’ (“not-I”) which has called forth his or her own existence. He also knows that the ‘thou’ which calls forth his own existence in turn constitutes an ‘I’ which has in his ‘I’ its ‘thou’. The ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ thus become, in the dialectic of these relationships, two ‘thous’ which become two ‘I’s.351 This formulation is quite opposed to the Sartrian Other who is seen as an enemy, a competitor. Thus Freire, as the situation arises, is not afraid to revise Sartre. The dialogical theory of action does not involve a Subject, who dominates by virtue of conquest, and a dominated object. Instead, there are Subjects who meet to name the world in order to transform it. If at a certain historical moment the oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfil their vocation as Subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem (which always involves some form of action) will help them achieve this vocation.352 The above does not mean that in the dialogical task there is no role for a revolutionary leadership. It means merely that the leaders – in spite of their important, fundamental, and indispensable role – do not own the people and have no right to steer the people blindly towards their salvation. Such a salvation would be a mere gift from the leaders to the people – a breaking of the dialogical bond between them, and a reducing of the people from co-authors of liberating action into the objects of this action, observes Freire.353 In order for the oppressed to unite, they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature. To achieve this indispensable unity the revolutionary process must be, from the beginning, cultural action. The methods used to achieve the unity of the oppressed will depend on the latter’s historical and existential experience within the social structure.354 Dialogical cultural action does not have as its aim the disappearance of the permanence-change dialectic (an impossible aim, since disappearance of the dialectic would require the disappearance of the social structure itself and thus of men and women); it aims, rather, at surmounting the antagonistic contradictions of the social structure, thereby achieving the liberation of human beings, says Freire.355 Cultural synthesis is thus a mode of action for confronting culture itself, as the preserver of the very structures by which it was formed. Cultural action, as historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant alienated and alienating culture. In this sense, every authentic revolution is a cultural revolution.356 Instead of following predetermined plans, the leaders and the people, mutually identified, together create the guidelines of their action. In this synthesis, the leaders and the people are somehow reborn in new knowledge and new action. Knowledge of the alienated culture leads to transforming action resulting in a culture which is being freed from alienation. The more sophisticated knowledge of the leaders is remade in the empirical knowledge of the people, while the latter is refined by the former.357 Revolutionary leaders commit many errors and miscalculations by not taking into account something so real as the people’s view of the world: a view which explicitly and implicitly contains their concerns, their doubts, their hopes, their way of seeing the leaders, their perceptions of themselves and of the oppressors, 256


their religious beliefs (almost always syncretic), their fatalism, their rebellious reactions. None of these elements can be seen separately, for in interaction all of them compose a totality. The oppressor is interested in knowing this totality only as an aid to his action of invasion in order to dominate or preserve domination. For the revolutionary leaders, the knowledge of this totality is indispensable to their action as cultural synthesis.358 CULTURAL ACTION FOR FREEDOM

Introduction At the very outset Paulo Freire affirms that the basic aim of this work, ‘where the process of adult literacy is discussed, is to show that if our option is for man (human beings), education is cultural action for freedom and therefore an act of knowing and not of memorization’.359 ‘This act’, he continues, ‘can never be accounted for in its complex totality by a mechanistic theory, for such a theory does not perceive education in general and adult literacy in particular, as an act of knowing. Instead, it reduces the practice of education to a complex of techniques, naively considered to be neutral, by means of which the educational process is standardized in a sterile and bureaucratic operation’.360 As an explanation of the socio-historical conditioning of thinking and the necessity for critical reflection on such conditioning, Freire says: ‘From a nondualistic viewpoint, thought and language, constituting a whole, always refer to the reality of the thinking subject. Authentic thought-language is generated in the dialectical relationship between the subject and his/her concrete historical and cultural reality. In the case of the alienated cultural processes characteristic of dependent or object societies, thought-language itself is alienated, whence, the fact that these societies do not manifest an authentic thought of their own during the periods of most acute alienation. Reality as it is thought does not correspond to the reality being lived objectively, but rather to the reality in which the alienated man/ woman imagines himself/herself to be. This thought is not an effective instrument either in objective reality, to which alienated man/woman does not relate as thinking subject or in the imagined and longed for reality. Dissociated from the action implied by authentic thought, this mode of thought is lost in ineffective, false words. Irresistibly attracted by the life-style of the director society, alienated man/woman is a nostalgic man/woman never truly committed to his/her world’361. This is a brilliant explanation of the modus vivendi of the elite of a society which was previously a colony of a European power. Such awareness of oneself and the world, however, is not the result of a purely private choice, but of an historical process in which object societies, some more rapidly than others due to the structural transformations they undergo, reflect upon themselves and perceive themselves to be dependent. These moments, which characterise the transitional stage of such societies, are both problematic and creative. They testify to the emergence of the masses and to their clamouring presence in the historical process in varying degrees of intensity,362 says Freire. 257

CHAPTER 3

This popular presence naturally creates a new lifestyle in society, says Freire. It begins to reveal society’s internal and external contradictions, formerly undetected both by the masses and the so-called intelligentsia. In this way the alienated culture begins to be judged. Certain intellectuals begin to change their former view of society, really discovering soceity’s structure for the first time. What alienation defined as the intrinsic inferiority of the popular masses is now objectively recognized to be the result of alienation itself, which is discovered as the manifestation of a situation of domination. Thus the more the alienated culture is uncovered, the more the oppressive reality in which it originates is exposed. A two-fold pattern emerges. On one hand, the culturally alienated society as a whole is dependent on the society which oppresses it and whose economic and cultural interests it serves. At the same time, within the alienated society itself, a regime of oppression is imposed upon the masses by the power elites which in certain cases are the same as the external elites and in others are the external transformed by a kind of metastasis into domestic power groups.363 Thus Freire explains the cultural domination of the dependent society and the realization by the people of such domination. In either case there is a fundamental dimension to these societies resulting from their colonial phase: their culture was established and maintained as a ‘culture of silence’. Here, again, the two-fold pattern is apparent. Externally, the alienated society as a whole, as the mere object of the director society, is not heard by the latter. On the contrary, the metropolis prescribes its word, thereby effectively silencing it. Meanwhile, within the alienated society itself, the masses are subjected to the same kind of silence by the power elites.364 Please note how Freire transforms the concept of the culture of silence from the individual to the societal plane. Elaborating how the attempt of the people to have its own voice is thwarted by the powers that be, Freire says ‘As a man (woman) of this world, who has already lived some significant, if not excessively traumatic, experiences for having presumed to have a voice in the culture of silence, I have only one desire: that my thinking may coincide historically with the unrest of all those who, whether they live in those cultures which are wholly silenced or in the silent sectors of cultures which prescribe their voice, are struggling to have a voice of their own’.365 The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom Every educational practice implies a concept of man/woman and the world, explains Freire. He writes: ‘The process of men’s/women’s orientation in the world involves not just the association of sense images as it does in animals. It involves, above all, thought-language; that is, the possibility of the act of knowing through his/her praxis by which man/woman transforms reality. For man/woman this process of orientation in the world can be understood neither as a purely subjective event, nor as an objective or mechanistic one, but only as an event in which subjectivity and objectivity are united. Orientation in the world, so understood, places the question of the purposes of action at the level of critical perception of reality’.366 If, for animals, orientation in the world means adaptation to the world, Freire explains further, for man/woman it means humanizing the world by transforming it. For animals there is no historical sense, no options or values in their orientation 258


in the world; for man/woman there is both an historical and a value dimension. Men/women have the sense of ‘project’ in contrast to the instinctive routines of animals.367 The action of men/women without objectives, whether the objectives are right or wrong, mythical or demythologised, naïve or critical, is not praxis, though it may be orientation in the world. And not being praxis, it is action ignorant both of its own process and of its aim. The interrelation of the awareness of aim and of process is the basis for planning action, which implies methods, objectives and value options.368 No doubt Freire follows the Sartrian concept of ‘project’. Freire integrates the Sartrian concept with adult education thus: Teaching adults to read and write must be seen, analysed and understood in this way. The critical analyst will discover in the methods and texts used by educators and students practical value options which betray a philosophy of man/woman, well or poorly outlined, coherent or incoherent. Only someone with a mechanistic mentality, which Marx would call ‘grossly materialistic’, could reduce adult literacy learning to a purely technical action. Such a naïve approach would be incapable of perceiving that technique itself, as an instrument of men/women in their orientation in the world, is not neutral.369 Thoroughly criticizing texts (literacy primers) which naively tries to impart literacy (rather alphabetisation) without endeavouring to lighten up the world with the word, Freire says, ‘Still more, the a-structural perception of illiteracy revealed in these texts exposes the other false view of illiterates as marginal men/women. Those who consider them marginal must, nevertheless, recognize the existence of a reality to which they are marginal – not only the physical space but historical, social, cultural and economic realities – i.e. the structural dimension of reality. In this way, illiterates have to be recognised as beings ‘outside of’, ‘marginal to’ something, since it is impossible to be marginal to nothing. But being ‘outside of’ or ‘marginal to’ necessarily implies a movement of the one said to be marginal from the centre, where he/she was, to the periphery. This movement, which is an action, presupposes in turn not only an agent but also his/her reasons. Admitting the existence of men/ women ‘outside of’ or ‘marginal to’ structural reality, it seems legitimate to ask: Who is the author of this movement from the centre of the structure to its margin? Do so-called marginal men/women, among them the illiterates, make the decision to move out to the periphery of the society? If so, marginality is an option with all that it involves: hunger, sickness, rickets, pain, mental deficiencies, living death, crime, promiscuity, despair, the impossibility of being. In fact, however, it is difficult to accept that 40 per cent of Brazil’s population, almost 90 per cent of Haiti’s, 60 per cent of Bolivia’s, about 40 per cent of Peru’s, more than 30 per cent of Mexico’s and Venezuela’s, and about 70 per cent of Gautemala’s would have made the tragic choice of their own marginality as illiterates…..If, then, marginality is not by choice, the marginal man/woman has been expelled from and kept outside of the social system and is therefore the object of violence.370 The social structure as a whole does not ‘expel’, nor is the marginal man/woman a ‘being outside of’. He/she is, on the contrary, a ‘being inside of’, within the social structure, and in a dependent relationship to those whom we falsely call autonomous 259

CHAPTER 3

beings, inauthentic beings – for – themselves.371 This is Andre Gunder Frank’s theory of dependency brought to the individual plane. A less rigorous approach, one more simplistic, less critical, more technicist, would say that it was unnecessary to reflect about what it would consider unimportant questions such as illiteracy and teaching adults to read and write. Such an approach might even add that the discussion of the concept of marginality is an unnecessary academic exercise. In fact, however, it is not so. In accepting the illiterate as a person who exists on the fringe of society, we are led to view him/her as a sort of, ‘sick man/woman’, for whom literacy would be the ‘medicine’ to cure him/her, enabling him/her to ‘return’ to the ‘healthy’ structure from which he/she has become separated. Educators would be benevolent counsellors, scouring the outskirts of the city for the stubborn illiterates, runaways from the good life, to restore them to the forsaken bosom of happiness by giving them the gift of the word.372 Freire, thus, correctly ridicules the approach of the well-to-do in the Third World towards the illiterates. In the light of such a concept, – unfortunately, all too widespread, observes Freire, literacy programmes can never be efforts toward freedom; they will never question the very reality which deprives men/women of the right to speak up – not only illiterates, but all those who are treated as objects in a dependent relationship. These men/women, illiterate or not, are, in fact, not marginal….they are ‘beings for another’. Therefore the solution to their problem is not to become ‘beings inside of’, but men/women freeing themselves; for, in reality, they are not marginal to the structure, but oppressed men/women within it. Alienated men/women, they cannot overcome their dependency by ‘incorporation’ into the very structure responsible for their dependency. There is no other road to humanization – theirs as well as everyone else’s – but authentic transformation of the dehumanizing structure.373 From this last point of view, the illiterate is no longer a person living on the fringe of the society, a marginal man/woman, but rather a representative of the dominated strata of society, in conscious or unconscious opposition to those who, in the same structure, treat him/her as a thing. Thus… teaching men/women to read and write is no longer an inconsequential matter of ba, be, bi, bo, bu, of memorizing an alienated word, but a difficult apprenticeship in naming the world.374 By interpreting illiterates as men/women oppressed within the system, says Freire, the literacy process, as cultural action for freedom, is an act of knowing in which the learner assumes the role of the knowing subject in dialogue with the educator. For this very reason, it is a courageous endeavour to demythologise reality, a process through which men/women who had previously been submerged in reality begin to emerge in order to re-insert themselves into it with critical awareness, concludes Freire. Therefore, the educator must strike for an even greater clarity as to what, at times without his/her conscious knowledge, illumines the path of his/her action.375 The Adult Literacy Process as an Act of Knowing To be an act of knowing, the adult literacy process demands among teachers and students a relationship of authentic dialogue, says Freire. True dialogue unites subjects together in the cognition of a knowable object which mediates between them.376 260


The cognitive dimensions of the literacy process, says Freire, must include the relationships of men/women with their world. These relationships are the source of the dialectic between the products men/women achieve in transforming the world and the conditioning which these products in turn exercise on men/women.377 Learning to read and write ought to be an opportunity for men/women to know what speaking the word really means: a human act implying reflection and action. As such it is a primordial human right and not the privilege of a few ….. Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression and world-expression, of creating and re-creating, of deciding and choosing and, ultimately, participating in the society’s historical process,378 elaborates Freire. In the culture of silence, Freire further explains, the masses are ‘mute’, that is, they are prohibited from creatively taking part in the transformations of their society and therefore prohibited from being. Even if they can occasionally read and write because they were ‘taught’ in humanitarian – but not humanist – literacy campaigns, they are nevertheless alienated from the power responsible for their silence.379 As an event calling forth the critical reflection of both the learners and educators, the literacy process must relate speaking the word to transforming reality, and to man’s (woman’s) role in this transformation. Perceiving the significance of that relationship is indispensable for those learning to read and write if we are really committed to liberation. Such a perception will lead the learners to recognize a much greater right than that of being literate. They will ultimately recognize that, as men/women, they have the right to have a voice.380 Thus Freire reinterprets the process of literacy, which is not merely the ability to read and write but also the ability to transform the world. The adult literacy process as an act of knowing implies the existence of two interrelated contexts. One is the context of authentic dialogue between learners and educators as equally knowing subjects. This is what schools should be – the theoretical context of dialogue. The second is the real, concrete context of facts, the social reality in which men/women exist.381 In the theoretical context of dialogue, explains Freire, the facts presented by the real or concrete context are critically analysed. This analysis involves the exercise of abstraction, through which, by means of representations of the concrete reality, we seek knowledge of that reality. The instrument for this abstraction is …. codification or representation of the existential situation of the learners.382 Codification, on the one hand, mediates between the concrete and theoretical contexts (of reality). On the other hand, as a knowable object, it mediates between the knowing subjects, educators and learners, who seek in dialogue to unveil the ‘action-object wholes’,383 says Freire. This type of linguistic discourse must be ‘read’ by anyone who tries to interpret it, even when purely pictorial. As such, it presents what Chomsky calls a ‘surface structure’ and a ‘deep structure’.384 The ‘surface structure’ of codification makes the ‘action-object whole’ explicit in a purely taxonomic form. The first stage of decodification – or reading – is 261

CHAPTER 3

descriptive, says Freire. At this stage, the ‘readers’ – or decodifiers – focus on the relationship between the categories constituting the codification. This preliminary focus on the surface structure is followed by problematizing the codified situation. This leads the learner to the second and fundamental stage of decodification, the comprehension of the codification’s ‘deep structure’. By understanding the codification’s ‘deep structure’ the learner can then understand the dialectic which exists between the categories presented in the ‘surface structure’ as well as the unity between the ‘surface’ and ‘deep structure’.385 Let us suppose that, says Freire, we were to present to groups from among the dominated classes codifications which portray their imitation of the dominator’s cultural models – a natural tendency of the oppressed consciousness at a given moment. The dominated persons would, perhaps, in self-defence, deny the truth of the codification. As they deepened their analysis, however, they would begin to perceive that their apparent imitation of the dominators’ models is a result of their interiorization of these models and, above all, of the myths about the ‘superiority’ of the dominant classes which cause the dominated to feel inferior. What, in fact, is pure interiorization appears in a naïve analysis to be imitation. Basically, …when the dominated classes reproduce the dominator’s style of life, it is because the dominators live ‘within’ the dominated. The dominated can eject the dominators only by getting distance from them and objectifying them. Only then can they recognize them as their antithesis, as Fanon says.386 When the creation of a new culture is appropriate but impeded by the interiorized cultural ‘residue’, this residue, the myths, must be expelled by means of culture. Cultural action and cultural revolution, at different stages, constitute the modes of this expulsion.387 When we consider adult literacy learning or education in general as an act of knowing, says Freire, we are advocating a synthesis between the educator’s maximally systematized knowing and the learner’s minimally systematized knowing – a synthesis achieved in dialogue. The educator’s role is to propose problems about the codified existential situations in order to help the learners arrive at an increasingly critical view of their reality. The educator’s responsibility as conceived by this philosophy is thus greater in every way than that of his/her colleague whose duty is to transmit information which the learners memorize.388 The first type of educator, Freire explains, is a knowing subject, face to face with other knowing subjects. He/she can never be a mere memorizer, but a person constantly readjusting his/her knowledge, who calls forth knowledge from his/her students. For him/her education is a pedagogy of knowing. The educator whose approach is mere memorization is anti-dialogic; his/her act of transmitting knowledge is unalterable. In contrast, for the educator who experiences the act of knowing together with his/her students, dialogue is the seal of the act of knowing.389 To be an act of knowing, then, says Freire, the adult literacy process must engage the learners in the constant problematizing of their existential situations. This problematizing employs ‘generative words’ chosen by specialized educators in a preliminary investigation of what we call the ‘minimal linguistic universe’ of 262


the future learners. The words are chosen, firstly, for their pragmatic value, that is, as linguistic signs which command a common understanding in a region or area of the same city or country… and secondly, for their phonetic difficulties which will gradually be presented to those learning to read and write. Finally, it is important that the first generative word be tri-syllabic. When it is divided into its syllables, each one constituting a syllabic family, the learners can experiment with various syllabic combinations even at first sight of the word.390 Having chosen seventeen generative words, Freire continues, the next step is to codify seventeen existential situations familiar to the learners. The generative words are then worked into the situations one by one in the order of their increasing phonetic difficulty… these codifications are knowable objects which mediate between the knowing subjects, educator-learners, learner-educators. Their act of knowing is elaborated in the circulo de cultura (cultural discussion group) which functions as the theoretical context.391 In Brazil, before analysing the learner’s existential situations and the generative words contained in them, Freire and his-associates proposed the codified theme of human being – world relationships in general… In Chile, at the suggestion of Chilean educators, this important dimension was discussed concurrently with learning to read and write. What is important is that the person learning words be concomitantly engaged in a critical analysis of the social framework in which men/women exist. For example, the word favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the word callampa in Chile, represent, each with its own nuances, the same social, economic and cultural reality of the vast numbers of slum dwellers in those countries. If favela and callampa are used as generative words for the people in Brazilian and Chilean slums, the codifications will have to represent slum situations,392 observes Freire. There are many people, says Freire, who consider slum-dwellers marginal, intrinsically wicked and inferior. To such people, Freire recommends the profitable experience of discussing the slum situation with the slum-dwellers themselves. As some of these critics are often simply mistaken, it is possible that they may rectify their mythical clichés and assume a more scientific attitude. They may avoid saying that the illiteracy, alcoholism and crime in the slums, and its sickness, infant mortality, learning deficiencies and poor hygiene reveal the ‘inferior nature’ of its inhabitants. They may even end up realizing that if intrinsic evil exists it is part of the structures, and that it is the structures which need to be transformed.393 Freire points out that the Third World as a whole, and more in some parts than in others, suffers from the same misunderstanding from certain sectors of the so-called metropolitan societies. They see the Third World as the incarnation of evil, the primitive, the devil, sin and sloth – in sum, as historically unviable without the director societies. Such a manichean attitude is at the source of the impulse to ‘save’ the ‘demon-possessed’ Third World, ‘educating’ it and ‘correcting its thinking’ according to the director societies’ own criteria.394 The expansionist interests of the director societies are implicit in such notions. These societies can never relate to the Third World as partners, since partnership presupposes equals, no matter how different the equal parties may be, and can never be established between parties antagonistic to each other.395 It is highly philosophical 263

CHAPTER 3

in pronouncement and carries the essential truth. The statement carries Frank’s formulation of the third world too. Thus ‘salvation’ of the Third World by the director societies can only mean its domination, whereas in its legitimate aspiration to independence lies its utopian vision: to save the director societies in the very act of freeing itself.396 Conscientization occurs simultaneously with the literacy or post-literacy process. It must be so. In our educational method, claims Freire, the word is not something static or disconnected from men’s/women’s existential experience but a dimension of their thought-language about the world. That is why, when they participate critically in analysing the first generative words linked with their existential experience; when they focus on the syllabic families which result from that analysis; when they perceive the mechanism of the syllabic combinations of their language, the learners finally discover, in the various possibilities of combinations, their own words. Little by little, as these possibilities multiply, the learners, through mastery of new generative words, expand both their vocabulary and their capacity for expression by the development of their creative imagination.397 In some areas in Chile undergoing agrarian reform, Freire says, the peasants participating in the literacy programmes wrote words with their tools on the dirt roads where they were working. They composed the words from the syllabic combinations they were learning. ‘These men are sowers of the word’ said Maria Edi Ferreira, a sociologist from the Santiago team working in the Institute of Training and Research in Agrarian Reform. Indeed, they were not only sowing words, but discussing ideas and coming to understand their role in the world better and better,398 observes Freire. Imagine a book, says Freire, written entirely in simple, poetic, free language of the people, a book on which interdisciplinary teams would collaborate in the spirit of true dialogue. The role of the teams would be to elaborate specialized sections of the book in problematic terms. For example, a section on linguistics would deal simply, though not simplistically, with questions fundamental to the learners’ critical understanding of language. ‘Let me emphasize again’, says Freire, ‘that since one of the important aspects of adult literacy work is the development of the capacity of expression, the section on linguistics would present themes for the learners to discuss, ranging from the increase of vocabulary to questions about communication – including the study of synonyms and antonyms with its analysis of words in the linguistic context and the use of metaphor, of which the people are such masters. Another section might provide the tools for a sociological analysis of the content of the texts.’399 To undertake such a work, it is necessary to have faith in the people, solidarity with them,400 concludes Freire. Cultural Action and Conscientization It is appropriate at this point to make an explicit and systematic analysis of the concept of conscientization, adds Freire.401 The starting point for such an analysis must be a critical comprehension of the human being as a being who exists in and with the world. Since the basic condition 264


for ‘conscientization’ is that its agent must be a subject (that is, a conscious being), ‘conscientization’, like education, is specifically and exclusively a human process. It is as conscious beings that men/women are not only in the world, but with the world, together with other men/women. Only men/women as ‘open’ beings, are able to achieve the complex operation of simultaneously transforming the world by their action and grasping and expressing the world’s reality in their creative language’,402 says Freire. Men/women can fulfil the necessary condition of being with the world because they are able to gain objective distance from it. Without this objectification, whereby man/woman also objectifies himself/herself, man/woman would be limited to being in the world, lacking both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world…… ‘unlike humans, animals are simply in the world,’403 observes Freire. To exist, declares Freire, is thus a mode of life which is proper to the being who is capable of transforming, of producing, of deciding, of creating, and of communicating himself/herself.404 Whereas the being which merely lives is not capable of reflecting upon itself and knowing itself living in the world, the existent subject reflects upon his/her life within the very domain of existence and questions his relationship with the world. His/her domain of existence is the domain of work, of history, of culture, of values – the domain in which men/women experience the dialectic between determinism and freedom.405 Only beings who can reflect upon the fact that they are determined are capable of freeing themselves. Their reflectiveness results not just in a vague and uncommitted awareness, but in the exercise of a profoundly transforming action upon the determining reality. Consciousness of and action upon reality are, therefore inseparable constituents of the transforming act by which men/women become beings of relation. By their characteristic reflection, intentionality, temporality and ‘transcendence’, men’s/women’s consciousness and action are distinct from the mere contacts of animals with the world.406 What Freire presents here is an anthropocentric view of the world, a view that has as its constituent elements Marxism, existentialism etc. Engagement and objective distance, understanding reality as object, understanding the significance of men’s/women’s action upon objective reality, creative communication about the object by means of language, plurality of responses to a single challenge – these varied dimensions testify to the existence of critical reflection in men’s/women’s relationships with the world. Consciousness is constituted in the dialectic of men’s/women’s objectification of and action upon the world. However, consciousness is never a mere reflection of, but a reflection upon, material reality.407 If it is true, says Freire, that consciousness is impossible without the world which constitutes it, it is equally true that this world is impossible if the world itself in constituting consciousness does not become an object of its critical reflection.408 ‘Conscientization’ is viable only because men’s/women’s consciousness, although conditioned, can recognize that it is conditioned. This ‘critical’ dimension of consciousness accounts for the goals men/women assign to their transforming acts upon the world. Because they are able to have goals, men/women alone are capable 265

CHAPTER 3

of envisaging the result of their action even before initiating the proposed action,409 says Freire. Freire seeks to prove his contention by quoting Marx from Capital: ‘We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this, that the architect raises his/her structure in imagination before he/she erects it in reality’.410 Although bees, as expert ‘specialists’, can identify the flower they need for making their honey, they do not vary their specialization. They cannot produce by-products. Their action upon the world is not accompanied by objectification; it lacks the critical reflection which characterises men’s/women’s tasks. Whereas animals adapt themselves to the world to survive, men/women modify the world in order to be more,411 says Freire. The reader will observe that Freire adds an existentialist concept ‘to be more’ in the body of this theorisation which is derived from Marx. For men/women, as beings of praxis, to transform the world is to humanize it, even if making the world human may not yet signify the humanization of man/ woman. It may simply mean impregnating the world with man’s/woman’s curious and inventive presence, imprinting it with the trace of his/her works. The process of transforming the world, which reveals this presence of man/woman can lead to his/her humanization as well as his/her dehumanization, to his/her growth or diminution. These alternatives reveal to man/woman his/her problematic nature and pose a problem for him/her requiring that he/she choose one path or the other. Often this very process of transformation ensnares man/woman and his/her freedom to choose. ‘Nevertheless, because they impregnate the world with their reflective presence, only men/women can humanize and dehumanize. Humanization is their utopia, which they announce in denouncing the dehumanizing processes,412 observes Freire. Men’s/women’s relationships with the world are per se historical, as are men/ women themselves. Not only do men/women make the history which makes them, but they can recount the history of this mutual making. In becoming ‘hominized’ as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, in the process of evolution, men/women become capable of having a biography. Animals, on the contrary, are immersed in a time which belongs not to them, but to humans.413 There is a further fundamental distinction between the human’s relationships with the world and the animal’s contacts with it: only humans work. A horse, for example, lacks what is proper to man/woman, what Marx refers to in his example of the bees: ‘At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement’. Action without this dimension is not work. In the fields as well as in the circus the apparent work of horses reflects the work of humans. Action is work not because of the greater or lesser physical effort expended in it by the acting organism, but because of the consciousness the subject has of his own effort, the possibility of programming action, of creating tools and using them to mediate between himself/herself and the object of his/her action, of having purposes, of anticipating results. Still more, for 266


action to be work, it must result in significant products, which while distinct from the active agent, at the same time conditions him/her and becomes the object of his/her reflection. As men/women act upon the world effectively, transforming it by their work, their consciousness is in turn historically and culturally conditioned through the ‘inversion of praxis’. According to the quality of this conditioning, men’s/ women’s consciousness attains various levels in the context of cultural-historical reality. Freire therefore resorts to an analysis of these levels of consciousness as a further step towards understanding the process of conscientization’.414 Historical Conditioning and Levels of Consciousness ‘We will first study’ says Freire, ‘the historical-cultural configuration which we have called the “culture of silence”‘. This mode of culture is a superstructural expression which conditions a special form of consciousness. The culture of silence ‘overdetermines’ the infrastructure in which it originates…415 Understanding the culture of silence is possible only if it is taken as a totality which is itself part of a greater whole. In this greater whole we must also recognize, says Freire, the culture or cultures which determine the voice of the ‘culture of silence’. ‘We do not mean’, he adds, ‘that the culture of silence, is an entity created by the metropolis, in specialised laboratories and transported to the Third World. Neither is it true, however, that it emerges by spontaneous generation. The fact is that the ‘culture of silence’ is born in the relationship between the Third World and the metropolis. ‘It is not the dominator who constructs a culture and imposes it on the dominated. This culture is the result of the structural relations between the dominated and the dominators’. Thus, understanding the ‘culture of silence’ presupposes an analysis of dependence as a relational phenomenon which gives rise to different forms of being, of thinking, of expression, those of the ‘culture of silence’ and those of the culture which ‘has a voice’.416 Social structure, says Freire, is not an abstraction; it exists in the dialectic between super – and infrastructures. Failing to understand this dialectic, we will not understand the dialectic of change and permanence as the expression of the social structure,417 Freire observes. Let us return, suggests Freire, to the relationship between the metropolitan society and the dependent society as the source of their respective ways of being, thinking and expression. Both the metropolitan society and the dependent society, totalities in themselves, are part of a greater whole, the economic, historical, cultural and political context in which their mutual relationships evolve. Though the context in which these societies relate to each other is the same, the quality of the relationship is obviously different in each case, being determined by the role which each plays in the total context of their interrelation. The action of the metropolitan society upon the dependent society has a directive character, whereas the object society’s action, whether it be response or initiative, has a dependent character,418 Freire observes. The relationships between the dominator and the dominated reflect the greater social context, even when formally personal. Such relationships imply the introjection 267

CHAPTER 3

by the dominated of the cultural myths of the dominator. Similarly, the dependent society introjects the values and lifestyle of the metropolitan society, since the structure of the latter shapes that of the former. This results in the duality of the dependent society, its ambiguity, its being and not being itself and the ambivalence characteristic of its long experience of dependency, both attracted by and rejecting the metropolitan society,419 says Freire. The dependent society is by definition a silent society. Its voice is not an authentic voice, but merely an echo of the voice of the metropolis – in every way the metropolis speaks, the dependent society listens.420 Freire thus describes the mutual relationship of the metropolis and the satellite. The silence of the object society in relation to the director society is repeated in the relationships within the object society itself. Its power elites, silent in the face of the metropolis, silence their own people in turn. Only when the people of a dependent society break out of the culture of silence and win their right to speak – only, that is, when radical structural changes transform the dependent society – can such a society as a whole cease to be silent towards the director society.421 No doubt Freire derives his theory from the concept of the metropolis-satellite structure of Andre Gunder Frank. Latin American societies, explains Freire, were established as closed societies from the time of their conquest by the Spanish and the Portuguese, when the culture of silence took shape. With the exception of post-revolutionary Cuba, these societies are still closed societies today. They are dependent societies for whom only the poles of decision of which they are the object have changed at different historical moments: Portugal, Spain, England or the United States.422 Latin American societies are closed societies characterised by a rigid hierarchical social structure; by the lack of internal markets, since their economy is controlled from the outside; by the exportation of raw materials and importation of manufactured goods, without a voice in either process; by a precarious and selective educational system whose schools are an instrument of maintaining the status quo; by a high percentage of illiteracy and disease, including the naively named ‘tropical diseases’ which are really diseases of underdevelopment and dependence; by alarming rates of infant mortality; by malnutrition, often with irreparable effects on mental faculties; by a low life-expectancy; and by a high rate of crime,423 observes Freire. There is a mode of consciousness which corresponds to the concrete reality of such dependent societies. It is a consciousness historically conditioned by the social structure. The principal characteristic of this consciousness, as dependent as the society to whose structure it conforms, is its ‘quasi-adherence’ to objective reality, or ‘quasi-immersion’ in reality ….. the dominated consciousness does not have sufficient distance from reality to objectify it, in order to know it in a critical way. Freire calls this mode of consciousness ‘semi-transitive’.424 Under the impact of infrastructural changes which produced the first ‘cracks’ in them, the Latin American societies, entered the present stage of historical and cultural transition – some more intensely than others. In the particular case of Brazil, this process began with the abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. It accelerated during the First World War and again after the depression of 268


1929, intensified during the Second World War, and continued with fits and starts till the military coup in 1964 violently returned the nation to silence,425 says Freire. What is important, nevertheless, is that once the cracks in the structure begin to appear, and once societies enter the period of transition, immediately the first movements of emergence of the hitherto submerged and silent masses begin to manifest themselves. This does not mean, however, that movements towards emergence automatically break open the culture of silence. In their relationship to the metropolis, transitional societies continue to be silent totalities. Within them, however, the phenomenon of the emerging masses forces the power elites to experiment with new forms of maintaining the masses in silence, since structural changes which provoke the emergence of the masses also qualitatively alter their quasi-immersed and semi-intransitive consciousness.426 The objective datum of a closed society, Freire observes, one of its structural components, is the silence of the masses, a silence broken only by occasional, ineffective rebellions. When this silence coincides with the masses’ fatalistic perception of the reality, the power elites which impose silence on the masses are rarely questioned. When the closed society begins to crack, however, the new datum becomes the demanding presence of the masses. Silence is no longer seen as an unalterable given, but the result of a reality which can and must be transformed. This historical transition, lived by Latin American societies to a greater or lesser degree, corresponds to a new phase of popular consciousness, that of ‘naïve transitivity’. Formerly the popular consciousness was semi-intransitive, limited to meeting the challenges relative to biological needs. In the process of emerging from silence, the capacity of the popular consciousness expands so that people begin to be able to visualize and distinguish what before was not clearly outlined.427 Although the qualitative difference between the semi-intransitive consciousness and the naïve consciousness can be explained by the phenomenon of emergence due to the structural transformations in society, there are no rigidly defined frontiers between the historical moments which produce qualitative changes in men’s/ women’s awareness. In many respects, the semi-intransitive consciousness remains present in the naïve transitive consciousness. In Latin America, for example, almost the entire peasant population is still in the stage of quasi-immersion, a stage with a much longer history than the present one of emergence. The semi-intransitive peasant consciousness introjects innumerable myths in the former stage which continue despite change in awareness towards transitivity. Therefore, the transitive consciousness emerges as a naïve consciousness, as dominated as the former. Nevertheless, it is now indisputably more disposed to perceiving the source of its ambiguous existence, the objective conditions of the society.428 The emergence of popular consciousness implies, if not the overcoming of the culture of silence, at least the presence of the masses in the historical process applying pressure on the power elite. It can only be understood as one dimension of a more complex phenomenon. That is to say, the emergence of the popular consciousness, although yet naively intransitive, is also a moment in the developing consciousness of the power elite. In a structure of domination, the silence of the popular masses 269

CHAPTER 3

would not exist but for the power elites who silence them; nor would there be a power elite without the masses. Just as there is a moment of surprise among the masses when they begin to see what they did not see before, there is a corresponding surprise among the elites in power when they find themselves unmasked by the masses. This two-fold unveiling provoke anxieties in both the masses and the power elites. The masses become anxious for freedom, anxious to overcome the silence in which they have always existed. The elites are anxious to maintain the status quo by allowing only superficial transformations designed to prevent any real change in their power of prescription.429 In the transitional process, says Freire, the predominantly static character of the ‘closed society’ gradually yields to a dynamism in all dimensions of social life. Contradiction comes to the surface, provoking conflicts in which the popular consciousness becomes more and more demanding, causing greater and greater alarm on the part of the elites. As the lines of this historical transition become more sharply etched, illuminating the contradictions inherent in a dependent society, groups of intellectuals and students, who themselves belong to the privileged elite, seek to become engaged in social reality, tending to reject imported schemes and prefabricated solutions. The arts gradually cease to be the mere expression of the easy life of the affluent bourgeoisie, and begin to find their inspiration in the hard life of the people. Poets begin to write about more than their lost loves, and even the theme of the lost love becomes less maudlin, more objective and lyrical. They speak now of the field-hand and worker not as abstract and metaphysical concepts, but as concrete human beings with concrete lives.430 In the case of Brazil, says Freire further, such qualitative changes marked all levels of creative life. As the transitional phase intensified, these active groups focused more and more on their national reality in order to know it better and to create ways of overcoming their society’s state of dependency.431 The transitional phase also generates a new style of political life, since the old political models of the closed society are no longer adequate where the masses are an emerging historical presence. In the closed society, relations between the elite and the quasi-immersed people are mediated by political bosses, representing the various elitist factions. In Brazil, the invariably paternalistic political bosses are owners not only of their lands, but also of the silent and obedient popular masses under their control. As rural areas in Latin America at first were not touched by the emergence provoked by the cracks in society, they remained predominantly under the control of the political bosses. In urban areas, by contrast, a new kind of leadership emerged to mediate between the power elites and the emerging masses; the populist leadership. There is one characteristic of popular leadership which deserves our particular attention; we refer to its manipulative character, observes Freire.432 Although the emergence of the masses from silence does not allow the political style of the formerly closed society to continue, that does not mean that the masses are able to speak on their own behalf. They have merely passed from quasiimmersion to a naïve transitive state of awareness. Populist leadership thus could be said to be an adequate response to the new presence of the masses in the historical 270


process. But it is a manipulative leadership – manipulative of the masses since it cannot manipulate the elite.433 Populist manipulation of the masses must be seen from two different perspectives. On one hand, it is undeniably a kind of political opiate which maintains not only the naiveté of the emerging consciousness, but also the people’s habit of being directed. On the other hand, to the extent that it uses mass protests and demands, political manipulation paradoxically accelerates the process by which the people unveil reality. This paradox sums up the ambiguous character of populism: it is manipulative, yet at the same time a factor in democratic mobilization.434 Thus, the new style of political life found in transitional societies is not confined to the manipulative role of its leaders, mediating between the masses and the elites. Indeed, the populist style of political action ends up creating conditions for youth groups and intellectuals to exercise political participation together with the people. Although it is an instance of manipulative paternalism, populism offers the possibility of a critical analysis of the manipulation itself. Within this whole play of contradictions and ambiguities, the emergence of the popular masses in transitional societies prepares the way for the masses to become conscious of their dependent state.435 The passage of the masses from a semi-intransitive to a naïve transitive state of consciousness is also the moment of an awakening consciousness on the part of the elites, a decisive moment for the critical consciousness of progressive groups. At first there appears a fragile awareness among small groups of intellectuals who are still marked by the cultural alienation of society as a whole, an alienation reinforced by their university ‘formation’. As the contradictions typical of a society in transition emerge more clearly, these groups multiply and are able to distinguish more and more precisely what makes up their society. They tend more and more to join with the popular masses in a variety of ways: through literature, plastic arts, the theatre, music, education, sports and folk art. What is important is the communion with the people which some of these groups are able to achieve.436 At this point the increasingly critical consciousness of these progressive groups, arising from the naïve transitivity of the emerging masses, becomes a challenge to the consciousness of the power elites. Societies which find themselves in this historical phase, which cannot be clearly understood outside the critical comprehension of the totality of which they are a part, live in a climate of pre-revolution whose dialectical contradiction is a coup d’etat.437 In Latin America, the coup d’etat has become the answer to the economic and military power elites to the crises of popular emergence. This response varies with the relative influence of the military. According to the degree of its violence and that of the subsequent repression of the people, the coup d’etat ‘reactivates’ old patterns of behaviour in the people, patterns which belong to their former state of quasi-immersion. Only this ‘reactivation’ of the ‘culture of silence’ can explain the passivity of the people when faced with the violence and arbitrary rule of Latin American military groups.438 It must be emphasized, says Freire, that the coup d’etat in Latin America is incomprehensible without a dialectical vision of reality; any attempt to understand 271

CHAPTER 3

it mechanistically will lead to a distorted picture. Intensely problematical, unmasking more and more their condition of dependency Latin American societies in transition are confronted with two contradictory possibilities: revolution or coup d’etat. The stronger the ideological foundation of a coup d’etat, the more it is possible for a society to return afterwards to the same political style which created the very conditions for the coup. A coup d’etat qualitatively alters the process of a society’s historical transition, and marks the beginning of a new transition. In the original transitional stage, a coup was the antithetical alternative to a revolution; in the new transitional stage a coup was defined and confirmed as an arbitrary and antipopular power whose tendency before the continuing possibility of a revolution is to become more and more rigid.439 Cultural Action and Cultural Revolution Revolution, says Freire, is a critical process, unrealizable without science and reflection. In the midst of reflective action on the world to be transformed, the people come to recognize that the world is indeed being transformed. The world in transformation is the mediator of the dialogue between the people, at one pole of the act of knowing, and the revolutionary leadership, at the other. If objective conditions do not always permit this dialogue, its existence can be verified by the witness of the leadership.440 Che Guevara is an example of the unceasing witness a revolutionary leadership gives to dialogue with the people. The more we study his work, says Freire, the more we perceive his conviction that any one who wants to become a true revolutionary must be in ‘communion’ with the people. Guevara did not hesitate to recognize the capacity to love as an indispensable condition for authentic revolutionaries. While he constantly noted the failure of the peasants to participate in the guerrilla movement, his references to them in the Bolivian Diary did not express disaffection. He never lost hope of ultimately being able to count on their participation. In the same spirit of communion, Guevara’s guerrilla encampment served as the ‘theoretical context’ in which he and his companions together analysed the concrete events they were living through and planned the strategy of their action.441 Guevara did not create dichotomies between the methods, content and objectives of his projects. In spite of the risks to his and his companions’ lives, he justified guerrilla warfare as an introduction to freedom, as a call to life to those who are the living dead. Like Camilo Torres, he became a guerrilla not out of desperation, but because, as a lover of people, he dreamt of a new human being born in the experience of liberation. In this sense, Guevara incarnated the authentic revolutionary utopia as did few others. He was one of the great prophets of the silent ones of the Third World. Conversant with many of them, he spoke on behalf of all of them.442 In citing Guevara and his witness as a guerrilla, we do not mean to say, says Freire, that revolutionaries elsewhere are obliged to repeat the same witness. What is essential is that they strive to achieve communion with the people as he did, 272


patiently and unceasingly. Communion with the people, – accessible only to those with a utopian vision… is one of the fundamental characteristics of cultural action for freedom. Authentic communion implies communication among people, mediated by the world. Only praxis in the context of communion makes ‘conscientization’ a viable project. ‘Concientization’ is a joint project in that it takes place in a person among other persons, persons united by their action and by their reflection upon that action and upon the world. Thus people together achieve the state of perceptive clarity which Goldman calls ‘the maximum of potential consciousness’ beyond ‘real consciousness’.443 An explicit relationship has been established between the cultural action for freedom, conscientization as its chief enterprise, and the transcendence of semiintransitive and naïve transitive states of consciousness by critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is brought about not through an intellectual effort alone, but through praxis – through the authentic union of action and reflection. Such reflective action cannot be denied to the people. If it were, the people would be no more than activist pawns in the hands of a leadership which reserved for itself the right of decision-making.444 Let it be clear, says Freire, that technological development must be one of the concerns of the revolutionary project. It would be simplistic to attribute responsibility for these deviations to technology in itself. It would be another kind of irrationalism to conceive technology as a demonic entity, above and opposed to people. Critically viewed, technology is nothing more nor less than a natural phase of the creative process which engaged a human being from the moment he/she forged his/her first tool and began to transform the world for its humanization.445 Revolution is always cultural, whether it be in the phase of denouncing an oppressive society and proclaiming the advent of a just society, or in the phase of the new society inaugurated by the revolution. In the new society, the revolutionary process becomes the cultural revolution.446 We have spoken of the challenge facing Latin America in this period of historical transition. We believe that other areas of the Third World are no exception to what we have described, says Friere, though each will present its own particular nuances. If the paths they follow are to lead to liberation, they cannot bypass cultural action for ‘conscientization’. Only through such a process can the ‘maximum of potential consciousness’ be attained by the emergent and uncritical masses and the passage from submersion in a semi-intransitive to full emergence in the reality be achieved. If we have faith in human beings, we cannot be content by merely saying that they are human persons, while doing nothing concrete to enable them to exist as such.447 As Freire concludes his analysis of the various levels of conscionsness of the masses, especially in Latin America, with particular reference in Brazil, a critical comment seems appropriate at this stage. His classification of various levels of conscionsness, i.e., semi-intransitive, naïve etc are rather nebulous and indefinite and cannot be given any cognition that could be scientifically proved by psychology, anthropology or any other realm of specific field of knowledge. There is, however, no denying that through various forms of class-struggle, people’s consciousness 273

CHAPTER 3

registered a steady rise which ultimately threatened the whole Brazilian conservative establishment and coup d’etat was the only solution open to them. The socioeconomic basis of such eventuaility has been explicitly provided in the first part of this book. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971. Darcy Ribeiro, The Brazilian People, University Press of Florida, 2000. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1996. Josué de Castro, The Geopolitics of Hunger, Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1977. Ibid n. 2. Robert J. Havighurst and J. Roberto Moreira, Society and Education in Brazil, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965. Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, Continuum, New York, 1998, p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. pp. 4–5. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. pp. 5–6. Ibid. p. 6. Ibid. p. 6. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. p. 8. Ibid. pp. 8–9. Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. pp. 10–11. Ibid. p. 11. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. pp. 12–13. Ibid. p. 13. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. p. 15.

274

CRITIQUE OF PAULO FREIRE’S MAJOR WORKS 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid. p. 15. Ibid. p. 15. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. pp. 17–18. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. pp. 23–24. Ibid. p. 24. Ibid. p. 26. Ibid. pp. 26–27. Ibid. p. 27. Ibid. p. 30. Ibid. p. 32. Ibid. p. 32. Ibid. p. 33–34. Ibid. p. 33–34. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, The Continuum Publishing Co., New York, 1998. Denis E. Collins, Paulo Freire, His Life, Works and Thought, Paulist Press, New York/Ramsay/ Toronto, 1977, p. 9. Ibid. pp. 9–10. Ibid. p. 10. Robert Mackie (Ed), Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Pluto Press, London, 1980, p. 6. n. 8, p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. p. 3. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, 1966, pp. 3–30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Yale University Press, 1959, p. 159. n. 8, p. 6. Moscow Declaration of 81 Communist Parties, December 1960. Ibid. p. 8. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1967. Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1975, pp. 13–14. n. 8, p. 16. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970. Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968. Gilberto Freyre, Order and Progress, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970. n. 8, p. 33. Ibid. p. 34. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid. p. 37. Ibid. p. 37. Ibid. p. 39. Ibid. pp. 41–42. Ibid. p. 42. Ibid. p. 42. 275

CHAPTER 3 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143

Niels Lyhne Jensen (ed), A Grundtvig Anthology, James Clarke and Company, Cambridge, 1984. n. 8, p. 43. Ibid. p. 45. Ibid. p. 46. Ibid. p. 46. Ibid. p. 47. Ibid. p. 48. Ibid. p. 50. Ibid. p. 49. Ibid. pp. 50–51. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. p. 52. n. 8, p. viii. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 21. n. 79, pp. 13–14. Denis Goulet, Introduction. In Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, Continuum, New York, 1998, p. x. Ibid, pp. x–xi. Ibid, p. xi. Ibid, p. 87. Ibid, p. 87. Ibid, pp. 87–88. Ibid, pp. 88. Ibid, pp. 88. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 93. Ibid, p. 93. Ibid, p. 94. Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, pp. 95–96. Ibid, p. 96. Ibid, p. 97. Ibid, pp. 98–99. Ibid, p. 99. Ibid, pp. 99–100. Ibid, pp. 100–101. Ibid, p. 101. Ibid, p. 101. Ibid, pp. 101–102. Ibid, p. 102. Ibid, p. 102. Ibid, p. 103. Ibid, p. 104. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, p. 105. Ibid, pp. 106–107. Ibid, pp. 107–108. Ibid, p. 109.

276

CRITIQUE OF PAULO FREIRE’S MAJOR WORKS 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

Ibid, pp. 109–110. Ibid, p. 110. Ibid, p. 110. Ibid, pp. 111–112. Ibid, p. 113. Ibid, pp. 113–114. Ibid, p. 115. Ibid, p. 116. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 120. Ibid, pp. 120–121. Ibid, p. 121. Ibid, pp. 122–123. Ibid, pp. 124–125. Ibid, p. 125. Ibid, p. 128. Ibid, pp. 128–129. Ibid, p. 129. Ibid, pp. 129–130. Ibid, p. 130. Ibid, pp. 130–131. Ibid, pp. 131–132. Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, p. 135 Ibid, p. 136 Ibid, p. 138 Ibid, p. 144. Ibid, pp. 144–145. Ibid, p. 146. Ibid, pp. 147–148. Ibid, p. 148. Ibid, pp. 148–149. Ibid, p. 149. Ibid, p. 150 Ibid, pp. 150–151. Ibid, p. 151. Ibid, pp. 152–153. Ibid, p. 153. Ibid, pp. 153–154. Ibid, pp. 154–155. Ibid, p. 155. Ibid, pp. 155–156. Ibid, p. 157. Ibid, p. 158. Ibid, pp. 158–159. Ibid, p. 159. Ibid, pp. 159–160. Ibid, p. 160. Ibid, pp. 160–161. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, pp. 161–162. Publisher’s foreward; In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin Books, London, 1996, p. 9. 277

CHAPTER 3 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247

Ibid, p. 9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, The Continuum Publishing company, New York. p. 39. n. 195, p. 11. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 13 Ibid, pp. 13–14. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 17 Ibid, p. 19 Ibid, p. 19. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, p. 25. Jean Paul Santre, Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press, N.Y., 1966, p. 56. n. 195, pp. 25–26. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 26. David Caute, Essential Writings of Karl Mark, A London Panther, 1967, p. 61. Ibid, p. 239. n. 195, p. 27. Ibid, p. 27. Martin Heidgger, Being and Time, Yale University Press, 1959, p. 237. n. 195, p. 27. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, pp. 28–29. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 31. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid, p. 45. Ibid, p. 45. Ibid, p. 50. Ibid, pp. 50–51. Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 54. Ibid, pp. 54–55. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 57. Ibid, p. 57. Ibid, pp. 57–58.

278


Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, p. 59. Ibid, p. 60. Ibid, pp. 60–61. Ibid, p. 61. Asoke Bhattacharya, Existentialism: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, Eldorado, Calcutta, p. 381. n. 195, pp. 61–62. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 64. Ibid, p. 65. Ibid, p. 65. Ibid, p. 65. Ibid, pp. 66–67. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 69. Jean Paul Sartie, Words, Penguin, Middlesex, U.K. 1987, pp. 114–115. n. 195, p. 69. Ibid, pp. 69–70. Ibid, p. 70. Ibid, p. 70. Ibid, p. 71. Ibid, p. 71. Ibid, p. 72. Ibid, p. 72. Ibid, p. 73. Ibid, pp. 73–74. Ibid, p. 74. Ibid, pp. 76–77. Ibid, p. 77. Ibid, pp. 77–78. Ibid, pp. 79–80. Ibid, p. 80. Ibid, pp. 80–81. Ibid, p. 82. Ibid, p. 82. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 84. Ibid, p. 84. Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 86. Ibid, pp. 86–87. Ibid, p. 87. Ibid, p. 88. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 90. Ibid, p. 90. 279

CHAPTER 3 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343

344 345 346 347 348 349 350

Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 106. Ibid, p. 107. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid, p. 108. Ibid, p. 109. Ibid, pp. 111–112. Ibid, p. 112. Ibid, p. 113. Ibid, pp. 113–114. Ibid, p. 114. Ibid, p. 116. Ibid, pp. 116–117. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 120. Ibid, pp. 120–121. Ibid, pp. 122–123. Ibid, p. 123. Ibid, p. 126. Karl Mark, Economic and Practical Manuscept of 1844, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1961. n. 195, p. 127. Ibid, p. 128. Ibid, p. 129. Ibid, pp. 129–130. Ibid, p. 130. Ibid, p. 133. Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, p. 134. Ibid, pp. 134–135. Ibid, p. 135. Ibid, p. 137. Ibid, p. 139. Ibid, p. 139. Ibid, pp. 139–140. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, pp. 141–142. Ibid, p. 142. Ibid, pp. 142–143. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, Monthly Riview Press, N.Y., 1967. Ibid, p. 143. Ibid, p. 144. Ibid, p. 144. Ibid, p. 144. Ibid, pp. 144–145. Ibid, p. 145–146. Ibid, p. 146.

280


Ibid, p. 148. Ibid, p. 148. Ibid, p. 149. Ibid, p. 156. Ibid, p. 160. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, p. 162. Ibid, p. 163. Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, pp. 13–14. Ibid, pp. 14–15. Ibid, pp. 15–16. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 18. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, pp. 21–22. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, pp. 26–27. Ibid, p. 27. Ibid, pp. 27–28. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, p. 28. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 29. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 31. Ibid, pp. 31–32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, pp. 32–33. Ibid, pp. 34–35. Ibid, p. 35. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid, pp. 36–37. Ibid, pp. 37–38. Ibid, p. 38. Ibid, pp. 38–39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, p. 43. Ibid, pp. 46–47. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 51. 281

CHAPTER 3 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447

Ibid, p. 51. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 54. Ibid, p. 54. Ibid, pp. 54–55. Ibid, p. 55. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, pp. 56–57. Ibid, p. 57. Ibid, pp. 57–58. Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, pp. 58–59. Ibid, p. 59. Ibid, p. 59. Ibid, pp. 59–60. Ibid, p. 61. Ibid, pp. 61–62. Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 63. Ibid, p. 64. Ibid, p. 64. Ibid, p. 65. Ibid, pp. 65–66. Ibid, p. 66. Ibid, p. 66. Ibid, pp. 66–67. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, pp. 67–68. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, pp. 68–69. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, pp. 69–70. Ibid, p. 74. Ibid, pp. 74–75. Ibid, p. 75. Ibid, p. 75. Ibid, p. 78. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 82. Ibid, p. 83.

282

CHAPTER 4

FREIRE The Master as They Saw Him

Paulo Freire would have been 90 had he been alive today. From 1970 onwards, after his Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published, he has remained at the centre of every discussion on the philosophy and practice of adult education. In this chapter we shall examine four collections of essays published in 1972, 1997, 2007 and 2008. While the anthology of 1972 was the reflection of thinking in the United States, other works drew upon the criticism of a wide range of scholars from all over the world. The first collection of essays entitled Paulo Freire: A Revolutionary Dilemma for the Adult Educator was edited by Stanley M Grabowski and published on behalf of Syracuse University1. In his preface, Grabowski says, ‘Present day revolutions – of ideas as well as of violent uprisings - are actually the results of evolutionary processes, culminating in what suddenly appear to be radical changes. However, it often takes a dramatic move to ‘shake up’ the established way of doing things if not also shaking up the establishment. This is what Paulo Freire seems to have done and, in that sense, he is a ‘prophet’ more than a revolutionary, although he does propose a pedagogy of revolution’. Thus Grabowski considered Freire as a prophet of adult education and also a revolutionary pedagogue way back in 1972. He further writes, “Freire’s call for educational reform comes at a time when adult education is reaching the height of its enfolding and acceptance as a field of study. Fortunately, it is referred to as an ‘emerging profession,’ hopefully in the sense that it is not fully and completely established and, therefore, still young, vibrant, growing, changing, and open to further developmental change. It has not “matured” or reached the point where it begins to approach death and decay.”2 The first essay entitled. ‘Adult Education for Transiting’ by James A. Farmer, Jr. starts with the following statement: “Freire’s approach to adult education is designed to assist persons to transit from one way of perceiving reality to a more adequate way; from a state of oppression to a state of increased personal freedom.” He then describes the way Freire conscienticizes by quoting from an ex-priest who had worked as an adult educator with Freire. “Freire would go to a village and enter into conversation with people. He would ask them to help him observe the village life. He would have then help him take pictures of scenes of village activities which were familiar and common to most of the villagers. The villagers would them come together to see the pictures. “Freire would ask them to describe what they saw in detail, writing words under the pictures as they reflected on what they were seeing and feeling. “Then Freire would question the villagers about the contradictions in the explanations which they were giving about why things were the way they were. For 283

CHAPTER 4

example, in one village, the people described the harvest as being very poor. Freire asked them ‘why?’ Some of the villagers said, ‘because the land is tired.’ Freire then asked them why some of the land seemed to be very productive and other parts of the land seemed tired. They explained that the rich farmers had fertiliser and they didn’t. Freire then asked them how that was the case. The questions and answers continued, leading to issues related to their life situation. The topics discussed ranged from those which were primarily theological, political, or economic in nature to those which were basically philosophical in nature.”3 “Frequently, villagers gave fatalistic answers. Freire would always come back to the contradictions which the people themselves had exposed. The people then began, as a result of this process, to think for themselves and to become aware of alternative ways of viewing and coping with what had seemed to be insurmountable problems for themselves and their communities.” “In the process, people learned to read, to care, and to have a sense of worth. Freire called what happened to them conscientizacao (conscientization).”4 James contradicts those North American writers who consider Freire irrelevant and insists that there is much to learn from Freire so far as adult education is concerned. As for Freire’s relevance, James says, “Freire stands in a mainstream of adult education. A desire to provide adult education to the ‘wayfarer’, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed has been an intent of North American adult educators since before the American Revolution. Time and time again, adult educators have sought to make education available to the disadvantaged and the oppressed through folk schools, adult education for immigrants, manpower efforts, and literacy programs.” “But”, he continues, ‘adult educators have typically found their offerings of educational assistance more suited to and more frequently utilized by the upwardly mobile than the hardcore disadvantaged.”5 So far as philosophical assumptions underlying Freire’s approach are concerned, he says, “it would seem that Freire’s philosophical themes relate most closely to some of the principal motifs of both pragmatism and existentialism. Actually, more then existentialist, his educational approach may be described as humanistic, encompassing the practical implications of existentialist philosophy.”6 Jack London in his article “Reflections upon the relevance of Paulo Freire for American Adult Education” says, ‘We, as adult educators, are essentially humanists, and as such have been involved in a continuing search for an approach to our teaching that would contribute to the enhancement of the human condition. During this pursuit a significant number of us discovered Paulo Freire, and have been excited by his perspective on the need for change in order to promote the greater humanization of man. In particular, we have been stimulated by his deep respect and appreciation of the worth of human beings. We share his anti-elitist views and approach to learning, and are inspired by Freire’s commitment to the task of raising the level of consciousness of adults – both exploited and the exploiters to assist them to gain more control over their lives.”7 He adds that the crucial need to gain more control over our life has been frustrated by the growth of bureaucracy, development of technicism etc. The human capacity to destroy all life on earth suggests that we must be more critical of education that 284

FREIRE

does not involve us as active participants. In this context the writer looks at adult education as a way of freeing the adult mind so that humanization becomes an integral part of the human condition. Freire’s perspective, he opines, may suggest a more effective approach to undertaking this task than traditional education.8 Jack London says that some of the ideas of Freire contradict many existing practices of education in America. “We often confuse education and training or apply them interchangeably, because we equate education and training as one and the same,” he says. Much of the curriculum of formal education is developed for its value for the teacher and not the student. Far too many faculty members are elitists who mistrust students, he opines.9 The role model for adult education, says London, had tended to be the formal system of education.........and many adult educators in a search for status and power seek to emulate this system. Schools function as a socializing agency to categorize, filter out, or cool out students so that their ambitions and expectations are not “utopian” but “realistic” in terms of available opportunities. He further says, “Our schools tend to be a conservative force in society, primarily designed to support the status quo.”10 Those who are classified as being less “bright” are often assumed to be incompetent, deprived, depraved, emotionally handicapped, stupid, or just not capable of benefiting from an academic type program. These are the students, mostly from working class homes, and especially Blacks and Chicanos, who are frequently advised they will not make it through high school and are encouraged to take vocational education courses to “enhance their ability to get jobs”, says Jack London.11 Discussing in depth the kind of education available to the poor and marginalised in the United States, Jack London suggests the potential contribution of Paulo Freire. He says, “Existing research in adult education suggests working class adults are less likely than others to participate in adult education… This evidence highlights the potential contribution of Paulo Freire in developing an approach to the illiterate peasant and the worker, with very little schooling, who are the most difficult adults to reach in any society. In addition to the illiterate, we have many millions of adults who are functionally illiterate in terms of the demands of a rapidly changing society and world.”12 London says that ‘Freire’s emphasis upon the extreme importance of raising the level of consciousness of the mass of people as a pre-condition to true liberation must be placed upon “our own agenda for action”.13 He further adds that ‘the emphasis upon the individual and his acquisition of knowledge tempts one to neglect the truism that all learning emerges out of a social process.’14 Adult educators are concerned with social change. They are frequently characterized as change agents. Jack London feels that this concept of change usually deals with and focuses upon individual self-fulfilment. Another use of the concept of social change is in reference to change needed to improve the working of existing institutions, and this approach and meaning is also frequently used by adult educators. However, ‘if we talk about the need to change our priorities, and restructure some of our institutions, signifying a more radical approach to social change, we find 285

CHAPTER 4

few adult educators willing to accept, evaluate, or even think about the need for radical social change’.15 An important understanding, frequently ignored by adult educators, continues the author, is that “social understanding would result from social action rather than from academic study.’16 ‘The assumption is that’, says London, ‘if we change the individual, the resulting consequence will be the improvement of our institutions and society………..adult education is essentially a middle-class activity which serves the better educated, and adult educators have a “trained incapacity” to serve the disadvantaged groups in our society. The import of Paulo Freire is that he seeks to develop an educational theory which operates upon a theory of radical social change through the medium of an imaginative literacy program devoted to the raising of the level of consciousness of the oppressed and disadvantaged…… My judgement is that Freire’s approach to education and social change has important implications for our own country.’17 Manfred Stanley, in his article, entitled, “Literacy: The Crisis of a Conventional Wisdom”, says “My examination of this debate in education will take the form of a critical analysis of Paulo Freire’s writings on literacy and literacy training. Freire, best known for his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), has been chosen as the focus of this paper for three reasons. First, he is a highly learned man devoted to the theoretical explication of a mode of praxis in which he is deeply engaged. Second, Freire is no narrowly specialized thinker. That is, behind his attack on the established notion of literacy (although not clearly explicated in it) lies a coherent diagnosis of what has allegedly gone wrong in modern societies. Finally, his concrete proposals for change derive with uncompromising directness from the nature of this diagnosis. It is this connection between moral rationale and practice, not faddish negation, that makes him a radical thinker; radicalism entails locating what one believes to be the generic root of a problem, analyzing the implications, and acting accordingly.”18 Having said this, Manfred, after analyzing his concept of literacy in some detail, remarks, “Utopianism is, in my opinion, a problem in Freire’s thought. It is evident in an uncritical tendency to regard his notion of literacy as the key to liberation and a life of praxis for all men. This is to say that he does not apparently take much note of the complexities, much less the dark side, of the notion of liberation itself.”19 Later, Manfred says, “We thus see that literacy, defined as the awareness that people can make their world, is philosophically an insufficiently explicated legitimation of a revolutionary oriented literacy training”.20 “Hidden elitism”, says Manfred, “hovers behind any theory of false consciousness; he who understands the dimension of true consciousness, whatever they are, must necessarily – however temporarily – play the role of an elitist guiding the unenlightened to their proper destiny. Freire appears to accept this elitism for his educator, as we see in his almost religiously inspired prescription for his personage, ‘Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth’ Ironically this allows his teacher to bask within the historical after-image of the dedicated missionary, the most sophisticated of whom understood the technical psychology behind Freire’s program of literacy training quite well.’”21 “Freire’s views”, says Manfred, “place an extraordinary emphasis upon education as the instrument of liberation.”22 286

FREIRE

William McLeod Rivera in his article entitled “The Changers: A New Breed of Adult Educator” analyses Freire’s thoughts from the perspective of the development communication theory. He says, “Some educators affect their students or listeners, more radically than others. These educators usually have developed a psychological or psychosocial technique for catalyzing major individual transformations. I call these educators the ‘changers’, because they deliberately set out before all else to change perception, attitude or belief……. The changers… begin with the conscious mind and provoke new self-perceptions and attitudes that then influence behaviour.”23 He explains further: ‘Freire, for example, thinks of adult change as a re-emergence or rebirth. David. C. McClelland, in contrast, aims to intensify the need for achievement. For Carl Rogers, change means an increased sense of personal authority, self-direction, and co-operative ability. Psychologists, Dollard and Miller, among others, consider change to be an unlearning of neurotic behaviour and a learning to label fears, anger, and dependence as steps toward trying out responsible action.’24 ‘Freire uses strikingly different approaches to teaching the individual than does, for example, McClelland. Whereas Freire authentically dialogues to awaken the consciousness of the individual to his cultural and class reality, McClelland trains the individual psyschologically to accelerate economic development by enhancing his need for achievement. Both of them, in their different ways, strive to alter selfperception and motivation. The distinctive aims (and population groups) that Freire and McClelland work with relate to differing notions about social change.’25, says Rivera. In his article “Paulo Freire: Utopian Perspective on Literacy Education for Revolution”, William S. Griffith says, “Forty years ago George S. Counts asked, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? He questioned whether the function of education should be to transmit the culture to the untutored or to prepare them to work to create a society which would have fewer imperfections than the one in which they lived. Preparing students to adapt themselves to a static conception of their society seemed to Counts far less desirable than increasing the ability of the students to recognize the flaws in their society and to work to eliminate them.”26 He continues further, ‘Today Paulo Freire preaches a gospel of political revolution which is to serve as the motivating principle of his pedagogy. It will enable the poor and the dispossessed to learn and work in concert under the inspired leadership of disenchanted members of the upper classes who emerge in some spontaneous and unpredictable way. Together they will overthrow the existing oppressive government and replace it with a utopian form of governance which will serve the poor and lovingly restrain their former oppressors.’27 Criticising Freire, he says, ‘Freire’s criticisms of education, based primarily on his assumptions about the relationship between the teachers and the students, are neither new nor particularly useful in bringing about an improvement in the process. He asserts that education is suffering from “narration sickness” because the teacher, in the role of a narrating subject, presents content to students, serving as patient listening objects, with the result that the material to be learned becomes ‘lifeless and petrified’. John Dewey called for the improvement of pedagogy by involving the learners in the process of seeking solutions to practical problems they faced. However, Dewey did not seem to 287

CHAPTER 4

believe that a political revolution would be the most valuable end education would serve.’28 Griffith further says, “There is no evidence in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that Freire was interested in examining the literature of adult education research before presenting his pedagogy ……his notions about the necessity for making the student an active, questioning, thinking participant in the formal education process… are neither new nor revolutionary.”29 He, however, adds, “Literacy curriculum materials are criticized with some justification by Freire…. He suggests that edited transcriptions of the conversations of a group of students be used as texts for reading.…… The suggestion of developing texts from the life experiences and conversations of the illiterate students would likely be supported by most adult educators, and if the editing is done painstakingly it is not unreasonable to assume that reading specialists would endorse this approach also.’30 Bruce O. Boston in his article, “Paulo Freire: Notes of a Loving Critic”, wrote, ‘…a positive appreciation of Freire must take into account three of his fundamental ideas. First, Freire is to be commended for his refusal to dichotomize action and reflection. For him these are poles on a continuum that cannot be broken up except at the peril of the educational process; indeed, at the peril of culture itself.’31 He states further, “Freire’s understanding of the relationship between action and reflection is something like the following diagram. Here action and reflection are seen as two intertwining lines, situated in the force field of culture. Conscientization is Freire’s name for what happens at the various points of convergence along a historical continuum. Both action and reflection, and thus our future, are changed and redirected as a result of this convergence. Our lived cultural experience acts as a field of force which keeps the action and reflection lines ‘from flying off the chart’, and also keeps the lines from flattening out to form a one-dimensional existence.’32

‘A second premise upon which Freire operates, and one which is equally laudable’, says the author, “is his insistence on the non-neutrality of education. All too often we tend to regard education as the public transmission of neutral bits of information about the world, which can then be used according to the private disposition of the learner. We regard the material as empty of ideological content, 288

FREIRE

similar to a shovel or a pencil. But even the simplest implements of culture reflect an ideology for Freire. For him there is no neutral educational process; it functions in one of two ways. It may be used as an instrument to indoctrinate the younger generation into the values, the presuppositions and the logic of the given culture. Or, it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means whereby men and women deal critically with their own reality and transform it to their own ends.’33 ‘There is a third premise’, says the author, ‘to which I would like to lend support.’ ‘He insists that human consciousness is intentionalizing. Consciousness for him is never static; it is always on its way somewhere, engaged in some project, attaching itself to some object. Put differently, Freire does not believe that consciousness exists apart from relationships, but that the relationship between consciousness and its object is the “stretching toward” the latter on the part of the former. Consciousness is not merely receptive of stimuli from the world in which it lives; it is purposive in regard to it. Here Freire joins ranks with many current critics of the Cartesian Assumption and ties his critique directly to the educational process. The Subject/Object dichotomy is epistemologically specious, says Freire, for we only know-in-relation. To truly know does not require that we separate ourselves from that which we wish to know, but that we become critically engaged with it with a view toward changing it. Indeed, “to learn about something is to change it, for to learn is to appropriate, name and use.’34 While supporting Freire on the abovementioned points, Boston now registers his objections. He says, ‘The criticism is simply this: it ill behoves an educator for liberation to present himself to interested readers cloaked in such an obscure, convoluted, dull, overly metaphysical style, devoid of the real human experience which generated such provocative ideas. Freire was able to conscientize Brazilian peasants by getting them to tell their own stories, yet he tells us almost none of his. Granted that such works as Pedagogy of the Oppressed are intended to be theoretical expositions, even theory can be clearly written, and even more important, humanly written……..There is simply a contradiction between a career in which the causes of clarity, demythologizing, demystifying, and de-obfuscation have been pursued at great personal cost, and the leaden philosophical prose which Freire inflicts on his readers.’35 ‘A similar point could be made in regard to Freire’s rhetoric. In an age when demagoguary and overblown phraseology abound it is difficult to identify talented and thoughtful polemicists, which, in part, is what Freire is,36 says the author. ‘The point of these criticisms about style and rhetoric,” says the author, “is not merely to enter a plea for clarity and the curbing of uselessly confusing rhetoric. It is that Freire’s penchant for obfuscation and his intemperate use of words such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘scientific’, ‘the people’, ‘ideological’, etc., give unloving critics the opportunity to attack him for all the wrong reasons. Better that Freire should be forced to do battle on the right issues rather than the false ones.’37 The author further adds, ‘…Freire’s propensity to see Latin American culture as a function of one basic relational pattern obstructs his vision with respect to others, which may be equally important for his educational ideas. All political, social and cultural data are forced into a univocal theory of relationships giving rise to a 289

CHAPTER 4

particular pedagogical thrust. What is becoming increasingly clear is that Subjection, as a way of being connected, is in more and more trouble the world over because of its failure to deliver the cultural energy for humanizing change. The same might be true of other modes of relationship, and they in turn, could be used for the conscientizing task.’38 adds the author. Further, he says, ‘It is clear from the literature by and about Freire that his epistemology was arrived at inductively. He began by immersing himself in a particular situation, out of which his literacy method was developed, from whence came a theory which finally issued in some philosophical notions about how it is we ‘know’. As this process of abstraction continued to move in step-level fashion, each new insight at higher levels of abstraction was checked against the experience of the concrete situation in which either Freire or his literacy cadres were involved. Such a procedure is both fruitful and praiseworthy. ‘What is objectionable is that, when the whole matrix of theory and praxis are presented, the reverse order is followed. It is epistemology which takes the pride of place. A theory of knowing is developed, then a method is advanced which corresponds to the theory, then a situation is evoked in which the method can be or has been used. As Freire works he proceeds inductively; as he speaks, he proceeds deductively. Some will protest that this is as it needs to be. Freire himself would probably say that such a procedure is wasteful, that it makes experience subservient to philosophy, and most important, that it contradicts the first principle of the epistemology he himself has experienced – that knowing cannot be separated from the intentionality of the knower in situ. The effect is that the explanation of a new educational approach is at odds with the approach itself.’39 Adult education and Development, a journal, brought out its 69th number in 2007 dedicated to Paulo Freire on the occasion of his 10th death anniversary. The editorial said, ‘Paulo Freire was one of the great educationists, and his influence conquered the world, spreading from Brazil throughout both the so-called Third World and many industrialized countries. He died exactly ten years ago – but his thinking lives on in theory and in practice. We commemorate this by devoting a section to his pedagogy of liberation.’40 The editorial also said, ‘There is hardly an educator who has had more impact on the development of our field of action, adult education, than Paulo Freire. He is one of the most frequently quoted authorities for literacy methods, and countless literacy programmes have been fashioned after his concepts; or at least they claim they have.’41 David Archer, one of the contributors, wrote ‘Ten years ago today the world lost one of the greatest educators of the twentieth century: the bearded Brazilian philosopher and activist Paulo Freire. Rather than becoming dated his ideas are more relevant today than ever before.’42 Elaborating how the IMF and the World Bank are stifling people’s education either by denying it financial support or by agenda – setting in favour of privatization of education, Archer said, ‘In most countries young people and adults who missed out on schooling face conditions that are almost unchanged since Freire wrote his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970. This was a call for action that arose from his work in Recife in the North-East 290

FREIRE

of Brazil. It laid out his vision of education for liberation. It is a text that has endured and that continues to inspire activists and educators around the world. ‘Paulo Freire had a clear vision that another form of education is possible. To achieve it will require public education systems that are adequately financed and that are truly committed to education for all – and systems where bankers do not drive the agenda.’43 On the night when Paulo Freire died on 3 May 1997, Rosa Maria Torres wrote a text which was published in the 53 issue of this journal. She updated the text for the 69 number. She wrote, “‘They don’t understand me’ he told me during an interview in Sao Paulo back in 1985. They don’t understand what I have said, what I say, what I have written.” Mystified by some, demonized by others, misunderstood by many, Paulo Freire often distanced himself from the images about him and his work that came from both theoreticians and practitioners, left-wing and right-wing, all over the world. Over and over again he asked his critics – but he might as well have asked his followers – to contextualize his work historically, to acknowledge the evolution of his thought and his self-criticism, and to allow him, in sum, the right to continue thinking, learning and living beyond his books, and in particular, beyond Education as a Practice of Liberty (1967) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1969), two of his most famous books, and where many, admirers and critics, left him virtually suspended. The Paulo Freire of last few decades, he who died last 2 May, 1997, is just as or even more alive than that of the 60s and 70s, although unfortunately unknown by the majority of the people.”44 She continues, ‘Followers and detractors have often coincided in reducing Freire to a caricature of himself, locking up his thought in a single field (generally, that of adult literacy), reducing it to a number of clichés, and even to a method and a set of related techniques. Around the world, Freire evokes terms such as literacy, adult education, conscientization, dialogue, banking approach to education, circle of culture, generative word and generative theme, thematic universe, action-reflectionaction, praxis, coding and decoding, participatory research, critical knowledge and critical reflection, dialectical relationship, speaking the word, transforming reality, pedagogy of the oppressed, culture of silence, cultural invasion, cultural liberation.’45 She says further, ‘Some refer to Paulo Freire’s method, (or methodology), others to Paulo Freire’s theory, others to Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, others to Paulo Freire’s philosophy (and philosophical anthropology), others to Paulo Freire’s program, others to Paulo Freire’s system. I asked him once which of those denominations he felt most comfortable with. ‘None of them’, he answered. ‘I did not invent a method, or a theory, or a program, or a system, or a pedagogy, or a philosophy. It is people who put names to things.’”46 ‘Freire was sensitive to both criticism and self-criticism around his work.’ says Rosa. “In numerous opportunities he acknowledged naivete, subjectivity, ambiguity, and lack of political-ideological clarity in his early writings, and a margin of personal responsibility in what he perceived as “appropriations” or false interprettations of his ideas. In particular, he referred many times to the naivete of his initial notion of conscientization. ‘I was ideologised as an intellectual petit – bourgeois,’ 291

CHAPTER 4

he admitted in 1973. ‘I started to worry about the use of the term ‘conscientization’. The corruption that word suffered in Latin America and in Europe was such, that I have not used it for the last five years,’ he said in 1974. ‘A less naïve reading of the world does not yet imply a commitment to its transformation, much less transformation as such, as idealist thinking might pretend’, he insisted in 1986, when he received UNESCO’s Education for Peace award in Paris”.47 Lidia Turner wrote a poem, a portion of which reads as follows: Today I heard you were leaving. I felt sad, partings are sad, But I also knew you were arriving, you were arriving with renewed strength among educators, among peasants, among village people, among the oppressed48 Alfonso Torres Carrillo in his article entitled “Paulo Freire and Educación Popular” says in his introductory remarks, ‘It is impossible to think of Paulo Freire without Educación Popular; it is impossible to conceive of the latter without reference to its creator and principal exponent’.49 On the question of the relevance of Freire and Educacion Popular, he says, ‘Given this deterioration in the living conditions of the majority of the population of Latin America and old and new forms of oppression and exclusion in the 1990s and the early years of the new century, protest has become widespread’,50 implying that the awareness that Freire had desired is there. Carlos Nunes Hurtado, in an article on the life of Paulo Freire, says at one point. ‘Without distorting the statistics that are perhaps familiar to us all, Xavier Gorostiaga and Manfred MacNeff demonostrate from United Nations figures that some 345 individuals – not companies – enjoy wealth equivalent to the domestic product of 40% of poor countries’.51 In the latter part of this essay he says that Paulo’s writings and thinking have to be reinterpreted dynamically and critically today and always. Benito Fernandez in his article “The Education of Young People and Adults (EYPA) and the Current Changes in Bolivia” demonstrates what Freire stressed: that there can be no changes in civil society without adult education.52 Carlos Calvao Muńoz, in his article “The Subtle Presence of the Teacher: The Influence of Paulo Freire on my Training”, eloquently describes Paulo Freire’s method of educating his own associates. He says, ‘Freire taught us that education was both easy and miraculous, that it required serious but pleasurable dedication, and that we were both teacher-learners and learner-teachers. It seemed that he was playing with words, arranging them to catch us out. He told us that it was not enough to say “educator”, because this ignored the “educatee” who was always present in the educator, even when invisible. He also taught us that no one ever learns anything definitively but “is” always “knowing” or bizarrely, “not knowing”.’53 He concludes his article thus: “Freire’s ability to go straight to the core still made me sit up, so that I do not understand those who say that Freire is out date”.54 292

FREIRE

Peter Mayo in his article “On Whose Side Are We When We Teach and Act?” says, ‘Freire’s impact has been strongly felt among many educators including those operating within progressive, social justice-oriented social movements. The reasons for this are many. The movements are often attracted to Freire’s philosophy and pedagogical approach because of the emphass on value commitment (“On whose side are we?”), on praxis, on the collective dimension of learning and liberation, on people capable of being tactically inside and strategically outside the system, on refuting cynicism with the belief that another world is possible (a healthy utopia), on the ongoing quest for greater coherence and on the need for persons to develop and constantly adopt a critical attitude.’55 K.O. Ojokheta wrote an article entitled “Paulo Freire’s Literacy Teaching Methodology: Application and Implications of the Methodology in Basic Literacy Classes in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.” The editors said, by way of introduction, ‘This study was carried out to investigate the application of Paulo Freire’s literacy teaching methodology in three carefully selected basic literacy centres organized and sponsored by a religious organization, the University of Ibadan, and a government parastatal (AANEE). The study was designed to find out if the application of the methodology truly helped in achieving the two major purposes of the methodology: political consciousness and literacy skills acquisition. Four post graduate students, who had undertaken a course on Philosophy of Adult Education, served as research assistants cum facilitators in each of the selected literacy centres. The study was quasi-experimental in nature’.56 ‘The findings of the study’ says Ojokheta ‘showed that three prominent issues: mismanagement of the nation’s resources, leadership and corruption as well as the political crisis in the states dominated the discussion of the learners at stage one. At stage two, the Generative Words discovered by the facilitators were: crude oil, stealing pocket, begging, poverty, suffering, crying, hunger, crisis, dying. These words were further depicted in pictorial images showing the core situations in the lives of the people. At stage three, the learners were so thoroughly conscientized, and sensitized with the pictorial images that they were no longer interested in the acquisition of literacy skills. In other words, the first of the two purposes of Freirean methodology (political consciousness) was achieved by the study. The implication of this finding is that facilitators wishing to apply Freire’s teaching methodology must be careful and, in fact, exercise caution in the application of the first two stages so as not to signal the death of the third stage. The actual process of literacy may not take place if the political consciousness of the learners has been thoroughly raised’.57 This observation gives rise to many other probable fallouts including the poser: what is first, politics or literacy; if acquisition of literacy is the secondary consideration, can we term these as literacy centres? If political consciousness becomes an impediment in acquiring literacy skills, should we aim at full-fledged political consciousness development? Convergence, the journal published on behalf of the International Council of Adult Education, brought out a special issue (volume xxxi, 1998, 1 & 2) on the tenth anniversary of Paulo Freire’s death. Ana Maria Araujo Freire wrote in her article “Paulo Freire: To touch, to Look, to Listen” that ‘I knew him since 1937, 293

CHAPTER 4

when I was a child. I saw him grow personally and intellectually, but not always close up, from that time until his death. From 1987 we shared everyday of our lives very closely. We realized at that time that besides our common ideas and our longtime friendship, there was something else that attracted us. It was love.”58 She continued, “We were married in 1988 and for the next ten years we would experience what for me are unforgettable dimensions – for me, of course, because he has gone and I have stayed – that only a relationship such as the one we had built, in a mature phase of life, of giving, understanding, and passion for each other can provide.”59 ‘His touch, his look, and his listening. Those gestures” says Ana, “revealed his sensitive side. But I believe that they went beyond the dimension of sensitivity. He loved people so much and always cultivated that love. He had the ability to touch other people with his small hands while he talked with them. He listened patiently, paying attention to everybody. His touching and his listening were completed by his strong and deep look. For Paulo, looking, touching and listening were categories that surpassed the sensitive, the emotional, and even the rational. They moved into the realm of the ethical, the aesthetic, the pedagogical, and for this reason, the political – where equal partnership can be found in the cognizance of a gesture, and the sensitivity of the human values of right and beauty.”60 Then she said something extremely important. She said, “It is out of his ability to listen, to open himself up without prejudice to the other that he constructed his theory of knowledge. Let me explain: When Paulo sat with the workers in Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, (as the director of the department of Education and Culture of SESI) in the 1940s and 1950s, he practised the epistemological – political-ethical-aesthetic-art of listening. The truths of common sense, myths and mystics – a reading of the world of fishermen, peasants and workers was the point of departure which he overcame and used to develop a new pedagogy, a new understanding of systematized education which he started in the 1960s.”61 She further adds, “Listening, while reading, studying and reflecting on the work of educators, sociologists and philosophers of Europe and the Americas – especially on matters concerning Brazilian reality – he could better understand what he was hearing from the grassroots. He transformed the act of hearing into listening. Thus he was able to write a theory of knowledge committed to the needs and wishes of the oppressed. What he heard from the people, he gave back in a systematized way. Through his lucid and critical reason and committed emotion he gave roots to that which came from magical, mystical and mythical sources.”62 In an introductory article by Paula Allman in collaboration with Peter Mayo, Chris Cavanagh, Chan Lean Heng and Sergio Haddad entitled, “…the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”, the authors say, “Paulo Freire, one of the foremost educational philosophers of this century, has bequeathed to us many powerful means to realise the hopes he mentions here (“From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in (humanity) and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”) as well as numerous others he dared to speak and write of during his life. By way of introducing this special issue, we will focus on his dialectical thinking which makes his analysis and his philosophical approach to education and social transformation so revolutionary 294

FREIRE

and influential throughout the world. It is this aspect of his work which is probably the most distinctive feature of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his best known (and arguably most compact) work, wherein the dialectical style of writing is sustained throughout. This is not to minimize in any way the value of his other works, and particularly his later ones, where he clarifies and develops some of the positions left implicit in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We would argue that some of these positions were also revised in the light of the new experiences of oppression and emancipation to which he was exposed in the later years of a highly eventful life as educator, activist, consultant to revolutionary governments (Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, Grenada) and ultimately educational policy-maker and administrator. His life was lived across different borders and in different geographical contexts.”63 Referring to Freire’s dialectical approach, they say, “While Freire’s dialectical approach encourages human beings to change attitudes and behaviours, this is a byproduct. The real focus is on the change or transformation of dialectical/social relations, beginning with those that exist within traditional and even progressive pedagogies which are often the reflection of broader processes of communication and social relations.’64 ‘In an educational context,’ say the authors, “Freire’s approach is not necessarily focused on changing the world. The intention is to prepare people, through dialogicalproblem-posing education, to want to change the world, to understand what needs to be changed and to believe in people’s collective power to create a humanizing destiny rather than the dehumanizing one that human beings have created in the past. In instances where his pedagogical approach has been inspiring, such as in Nicaragua before the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, as well as in the liberated zones of countries where guerrilla warfare was staged (as in parts of Latin America or in the anti-colonial wars in Africa), the pedagogy involved is intended to help prepare the climate for revolutionary change, even if it takes an armed struggle to bring about actual political change.”65 The authors write that ‘Freire’s ontological theory is radical because it critiques what it has meant thus far to be a human being and also offers the philosophy of what we could become. Therefore it is not only a theory of being but also a theory of becoming. His theory of knowledge is equally radical /dialectical. Accordingly, no person is an’empty vessel’ or devoid of knowledge. Many people have valuable experiential knowledge; all of us have opinions and beliefs; others have greater or lesser degrees of extant – i.e., already existing – knowledge and may even hold qualifications that signify their ‘possession’ of that knowledge. However, in Freirean education the affirmation or acquisition of these types of knowledge is not the end objective of learning but rather the beginning of the dialogical/problem-posing approach to learning.’66 ‘The Freirean approach is praxis: reflection upon the action that informs one’s experience.”, say the authors. ‘This process, through which learning can occur in a variety of ways, can lead to transformative action. Learning can occur by achieving critical distance from what one already knows. Moreover, authentic Freirean dialogue is also praxis; it requires simultaneous action and reflection.’67 295

CHAPTER 4

‘Frequently overlooked’, say the authors, ‘is Freire’s unique fusion of Christian and Marxist ideas, which provides the guiding thread to his philosophy. This has its roots in the radical religious tradition that finds expression today in liberation theology and attests to Freire’s influence on Brazil’s radical religious organizations of the late 1950s and 1960s.Freire has often been misunderstood because people ignore the importance of Karl Marx to his analysis and, consequently, to his philosophy.’68 ‘The fusion’, They continue, ‘of these two strands in Freire’s work is probably one of the main reasons why one can notice his strong influence on the education document produced by the Latin American Bishops at the 1968 Episcopal Conference in Medellin, Colombia, a landmark in the development of liberation theology.’69 Daniel Schugurensky in his article entitled “The Legacy of Paulo Freire: A Critical Review of His Contributions”, says, ‘Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and more importantly, friend of humankind, died last year at the age of 75.He was an adult educator strongly committed to the progressive politics of the twentieth century, travelling the path with Jane Adams, Fannia Mary Cohn, Roby Kidd, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Eduard Lindeman, Myles Horton, Julius Nyerere and many others. Throughout his life, both in Brazil and abroad, he engaged in liberatory projects and critically reflected on his actions. He manifested anger and rigour in denouncing structures of oppression, and immense love and creativity in announcing a better world. By describing his village, he wrote a universal message and eventually became one of the most important Latin American intellectuals of this time, and certainly its foremost adult educator. He gave new impetus to the popular education movement and influenced the development of participatory-action research models. His work has been read, discussed and applied by thousands of people in a great variety of countries and disciplines. He may no longer be here with his humour and his passion, but he is present through his legacy and through every adult educator who reinvents him in order to challenge oppression.’70 Daniel says, ‘Freire was always open to challenging, new ideas, to self-criticism, and to reconsideration of his assumptions, his arguments and his language. His original approach, rooted in the tenets of progressive education, Marxism and liberation theology, was later enriched by the contributions of post-colonial theory, feminism, critical race theory and post-modernism. His production …was dynamic.’71 Daniel says further, “One of the main appeals of the book (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) is Freire’s development of a critical reflection about his own practices as an adult educator. Hence, methodological, theoretical and political concerns interplay constantly, and local experiences are related to such universal themes as the relationships between individual consciousness and the social world, authority and freedom, and oppression and social change.”72 ‘Together with Marx and the Bible are Sartre and Husserl, Mounier and Buber, Fannon and Memmi, Mao and Guevara, Althusser and Fromm, Hegel and Unamuno, Kosik and Furter, Chardin and Maritain, Marcuse and Cabral. Even though Freire was influenced by these and other authors, his merit was to combine their ideas into an original formulation. As Fausto Franco has pointed out, in reading Freire one may have the impression of listening to familiar sounds everywhere, but at the 296

FREIRE

same time experiencing an overall harmony of the whole that is new.’73 adds the author. ‘Indeed,’ he adds further, “Freire provided one of the most creative synthesis of twentieth century adult education theory, in which he articulated a language of critique and a language of possibility at a time when it was most needed…’74 ‘One of the most important concepts in Freire’s early works is conscientization (consciousness-raising or critical awareness), the ability to critically perceive the causes of reality. Freire claims that reading the word cannot be separated from reading the world, but acknowledges that the possibilities of conscientization are limited. Although a transition from a naïve to a critical consciousness is key in the process of liberation, it should not be assumed that a critical consciousness leads automatically to a process of transformation. This means that a critical consciousness is a necessary but insufficient condition for collective change. While in his first works Freire takes a subjectivist stand, assuming that the unveiling of reality would translate into transformative action, in further writings he revisited his position and recognized that a more critical understanding of oppressive situations, although a step in the right direction, does not yet liberate the oppressed.’75, says Daniel. ‘Between Education as a Practice of Freedom and Pedagogia de Autonomia, it is possible to find many faces of Freire. Each one of his books reflects an engagement in a particular political-pedagogic activity and was influenced by the historical context and the milieu in which it was written,’76 says Daniel by way of explanation. “The democracy he was keen about”, says Daniel Schugurensky, “was not laissezfaire democracy that proclaims an abstract equality and freedom and blames the victims for their own failure, but a radical one which aims at helping the dominated groups to develop political determination, that is, to organize and mobilize in order to achieve their own objectives”.77 While he cautioned us, says the author, against the positivism and authoritarianism inherent in modernist projects, he also alerted us to the reactionary version of post-modernism that assumes the disappearance of dreams and utopias.78 In 1980, as Minister of Education of Sao Paulo, Freire had the second opportunity in Brazil to influence educational change from an administrative post. From this position he fostered higher degrees of autonomy, collective participation in decisionmaking and community involvement in public schools, all of which implied a decentralization of power. In performing this job, he claimed that he did not incur the typical abuses related to positions of authority in Latin America, and was proud of it, because he proved to other people – and to himself, – that power does not always corrupt, says Schugurensky.79 One of the recurrent criticisms to Freire’s early works, says the author, concerns language. The style of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for instance, has been criticized for being difficult, pompous, snobbish, elitist, convoluted, arrogant and metaphysical. Freire responds to those criticisms by arguing for the importance of aesthetic pleasure and good taste in writing, and for the need for students to read and understand “difficult” books, even if it required effort and discipline. He argued that a writer should be simple, but never simplistic. Moreover, the sexist language of the book raised the concerns of many feminists, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. The 297

CHAPTER 4

countless letters of complaint that Freire received made him realize the extent to which ideology resides in language and after that he saw to it that all sexist language were eliminated from subsequent editions of his books. A related criticism to his early works is the absence of references to race and gender issues, as if oppression were only about class. As a result of these critics, in later works he undertook a more complex understanding of domination, incorporating elements of feminism and post-modernism, yet he expressed a concern about the refusal of anti-racist and anti-sexist movements to accept the concept of social class in their analysis of social reality and in their own fight against sexism and racism.80 Freire’s first works, the author says, were also challenged for their naiveté and ideological-political ambiguity. According to these critics, Freire seemed to suggest that reading the world was a necessary and sufficient condition to change it, assuming that a critical reading of the reality would automatically lead to its transformation. To his credit, Freire had claimed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that “praxis implies no dichotomy by which praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. Action and reflection occur simultaneously.81 The author also adds, ‘Critics argued that Freire’s method not only emphasized reflection over action, but lacked a clear political conception of social change effectively linking consciousness with liberation. This was a concern that Freire took seriously. Thanks to those critics, he became aware of the excessive ‘psychologism’, voluntarism and idealism inherent in his original approach. At the same time, he was very cautious to avoid the opposite mistake, over-emphasising material conditions, as if the world were not a social construction. Then, Freire was able to find a leading place in the critical tradition, exploring the relationships between education, reproduction and social change, and providing useful insights on the dialectics between structural constraints and human agency.’82 Another aspect of controversy is the directiveness of the educational process. Because he proposed a dialogical relation between teacher and student, in which the content is not imposed by the former, many readers have inferred that Freire advocated a non-directive model. Departing from this assumption, some commentators have argued that Freire’s model has an internal contradiction: how can the content and direction of the educational process be determined by both the teacher and the learner on an equal footing, when the teacher has an a priori destination (e.g. the development of a critical consciousness) to reach at the end of that process?83 asks Daniel. This leads to another problematic area, says Daniel, which is how to reconcile this directiveness with a genuine respect for the ideas and opinions of the learner. Freire stressed that teachers should not impose their views on students, but he also said that they are not – and should not be – neutral agents. But some tensions arise. Can we have both directiveness and a truly genuine dialogue? What if the slave aspires to be the master, or if an educator does not want to become a transformative intellectual? Are they automatically ‘wrong’ in the eyes of an emancipatory educator? Or, as Giroux asked, how can the task of validating certain forms of ‘correct’ thinking be reconciled with the pedagogical task of helping students to avoid following authoritarian dictates, regardless of how radical they are?84 298

FREIRE

A related concern, says Schugurensky, has to do with Freire’s views on popular knowledge. Cultural anthropologists contend that his portrayal of the oppressed as immersed in a naïve consciousness assumes that they are acritical and unable to establish casual relations, which is contrary to empirical evidence. Critics also claim that in his descriptions of banking education and extension, Freire seems to assume that the oppressors can forcibly impose their ideologies and values on vulnerable ‘recipients’ who are incapable of discernment and cannot choose between adopting the new knowledge, selectively appropriating it, or rejecting it altogether. In the same vein, it is claimed that his project of consciousness-raising adopts a hierarchical and patronizing approach to consciousness which ignores that the learners can have far superior information and understanding than their teachers on various topics.85 Daniel concludes that, in spite of these criticisms, Freire has provided an invaluable contribution to adult literacy, to popular education and to the understanding of the role of culture in social reproduction and social change, not only in developing countries but also in developed ones. By translating the principles of progressive education to the field of adult education, and linking them to the tradition of community organization for social change, he provided a powerful combination. By crossing disciplinary boundaries, he encouraged a much-needed dialogue among fields of enquiry. By talking simultaneously about reason and knowledge and about love and hope, he brought together understanding and sensitivity. Today, in the context of global and social polarization, increasing levels of marginalization and new dimensions of poverty, his ideas need to be re-thought, adapted, challenged and re-invented to face the new century.86 In an article, entitled “Tribute to Paulo Freire: His Influence in Colonial Africa”, Prosper Godonoo says, “As far as the usable is concerned, the “alibi of the past” makes many Africans unable to ‘live in time like fish in water’ because they still feel that their past is ‘one long night of savagery from which the Europeans acting on God’s behalf, delivered them.” For this reason, some Africans regard their past to be of no use. Paulo’s invocation as it relates the economic and ideological conditioning of the infrastructure and superstructure that ‘to understand the levels of consciousness, we must understand the cultural-historical reality as a superstructure in relation to an infrastructure’ acts as encouragement for African scholars such as Mudimbe (1980) who insists that ‘the colonial ethnographic library’ enables many Africans to affirm their cultural history and political identity. As a result, there is renewed enthusiasm and energy within the academy for Africans to employ the ‘usable past’ in order to build nations, fight poverty, and negotiate social and intellectual justice.’87 He says further, ‘It is easy for educators to discuss the liberal arts in the comforts of a university lecture hall or in a North American classroom. It is far more practical to talk about liberating arts in an African village, with muddy streets populated by hungry people seeking their social-space. Freire’s work has provided an avenue and a hub for synthesizing progressive ideas for the socio-political transformation of societies in Africa, as exemplified by the work of scholars such as Thandika Mkandawire, Claude Ake, Mamoun Mondani, Buchi Emechita, Abena Busia, Tiyambe Zeleza, Julius Ihonvbere, and El Sadaarwi.’88 299

CHAPTER 4

‘Freire’s work,’ he says again, ‘has resonated with millions of Africans who have become disillusioned with failed regimes across the continent. Thus, many Africans who have read and listened to Freire have become willing risk-takers for the sake of social justice, building social movements and organizations that seek to challenge the various regimes. The pro-democracy movements on the African continent strive for justice and the delivery of a ‘humanizing environment’ for all citizens inspired by the work of Paulo Freire. A partial list includes the Alliance for the Restoration for Democracy (AFORD) in Malawi, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD) in Kenya; the United Democratic Front (UDF) in Malawi, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) in Congo (formerly Zaire), the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), and the Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Of particular interest is the movement in Nigeria led by the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) which challenged the remilitarization of the political landscape, and so provided impetus and international recognition for Nigeria’s pro-democracy movements after Sani Abacha’s coup in November 1993.”89 In her article “Fragmented Ethics of Justice: Freire, Liberation Theology and Pedagogies of the Non-poor”, Elizabeth Lange says, ‘As part of the wider celebration of Freire’s life and thought, this paper addresses the theological roots that provided a normative foundation for Freire. In particular, it was the compelling intersection between Freire’s pedagogy and liberation theology that enlivened the establishment of the Ecumenical Coalitions for social Justice by five Canadian Christian churches some twenty five years ago.”90 ‘In essence’, says Elizabeth, ‘the meaning of liberation was a question about the meaning of Christianity and the vocation of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. By implication, liberation theologians determined that churches are called not to take sides but to change sides: from siding with the ‘powers and principalities’ to siding with the poor. As Freire emphasizes, the prophetic church must denounce the present reality and how they profit through their legitimating function and announce the radical transformation of the Church toward justice through praxis. To do this the church must “really experience their own Easter, that they die as elitists so as to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed.” The litmus test, then, for the justice or injustice in any society and any institution is its treatment of the poor and powerless.’91 The author further adds, ‘Freire poses the key question: ‘How can we transform the process of transforming the comprehension of the world into a process of transforming the world?’ A new social order will not be built on pedagogies that generate wealth guilt, fear of global doom, calls for material ‘sacrifice’, or by what is perceived as institutional or corporate blaming. A new social order, however, will be built on shifted perceptual boundaries that clearly name the psychosocial structures that perpetuate the multiple alienations, fatalisms, and despairs of the non-poor and that are intrinsic to their material position.’92 She concludes her article by saying that “those who live out of a radical love transcend formulas and methods and often become regenerators of symbolic systems. As we bid farewell to Freire’s physicality, we remember that he transcended the 300

FREIRE

contextual boundaries between the North and South with a compelling language of possibility and hope. We also remember that he challenged us to reinvent analyses, beliefs and pedagogical practices from within our social location for our historical moment.”93 Our final document in this connection is an anthology entitled Pioneers in Education: Essays in Honour of Paulo Freire edited by Michael F. Schaughnessy, Elizabeth Galligan and Romelia Hurtado de Vivas. In the Introduction, Michael W. Apple writes, ‘even though there have been and are criticisms of some aspects of the Freirian traditions both in Brazil and elsewhere, his work continues to inspire generations of committed educators who wish to not only “speak truth to power” but also to actively intervene in the processes that create such differential power in the first place.’94 He continues further, ‘Why are the critical traditions so important now, not only in Freire’s Brazil but in many other nations and in what we might say is ‘the belly of the beast’, the United States? As many of us are all too familiar with in the US, this is a time of unrelenting attacks on hard won gains, on social solidarity, and on anything that is public. Anything that is critical in cultural and educational work is seen as dangerous to the production of the possessive individualism that stands at the heart of both ‘our’ economy and increasingly our daily lives. This shouldn’t surprise us… there has been a good deal of creative ideological and pedagogic work done by the Right to change our common sense.’95 On the Freirean legacy, he says, ‘As we reflect on the continuing legacy of Paulo Freire, on the resources that he gave us, and on his effects on the lives of the authors in this volume and so many others throughout the world, it may be helpful to think about what the role of critical educators is in societies riven by massive inequalities. In my mind, in general, there are five tasks in which critically engaged scholarship/activitism in education must engage. “1. It must ‘bear witness to negativity’. That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination in the larger society. “2. In engaging in such critical analyses, it also must point to contradictions and to spaces of possible action. Thus, its aim is to critically examine current realities with a conceptual/political framework that emphasizes the spaces in which counter-hegemonic actions can be or are now going on. “3. At times, this also requires a redefinition of what counts as “research”. Here I mean acting as “secretaries” to those groups of people and social movements who are now engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal power or in what elsewhere I have called ‘non-reformist reforms’. ‘4. In this process, critical work has the task of keeping traditions of radical work alive…. This includes not only keeping theoretical, empirical, historical, political and practical traditions alive – and very importantly as I just noted, extending and (supportively) criticizing them. But it also involves keeping alive the dreams, utopian visions, and ‘non-reformist reforms’ that are so much a part of them. “5. Such work must also assist in the building of counter-hegemonic communities, supporting social movements and mobilizations, engaging with them and 301

CHAPTER 4

learning from them so that we all can go forward. Thus, all of the work of critical education is dependent on having real connections – not simply rhetorical ones – to these social movements and mobilizations. And it is dependent on our willingness to take risks and not to be defensive when those with whom we are working are critical of our efforts.’96 In her article entitled “The Role of Freire’s ‘Banking’ Analogy in the Educational Imaginary”, Megan Laverty says, “Freire has had an undeniable and impressive impact on educational reform in both developed and developing countries. He is probably the most widely known educational theorist we have today. Speaking from within the academy, he has been enormously influential on teacher education. The number of professors, from fields as diverse as nursing, music education, and early childhood, who incorporate Freire’s educational philosophy into both their writing and teaching, is overwhelming. This enthusiasm for Freire’s writing is due, in part, to both readiness with which his critique of traditional education is grasped and the suggestiveness of his dialogical, problem-posing alternative. The accessibility of Freire’s critique of traditional education derives from the persuasiveness of his ‘banking’ analogy.’97 On the banking concept of education, Laverty says, ‘The influence of the ‘banking’ analogy extends beyond its persuasive force to the level of enframement. It has been effective in structuring recent educational debates around the politics of teaching and learning. Today’s focus is on the way in which different pedagogies either reinforce and perpetuate wider social, political and economic inequalities or serve to disrupt and overrun them. Mary Leach writes, that “the academy and the classroom are coming to be viewed even by the popular press as “contested terrains” — that is, as political and cultural sites that represent struggle over what constitutes ‘proper’ knowledge by differently empowered social constituencies”. What is at issue is the role of education in transforming our shared, and different, social realities so as to make them more just, inclusive and equitable. Educators are thinking about ways to make pedagogical practices consistent with moral and political ideals. The language of education is political and economic as it is dominated by concepts of ‘social justice’, ‘praxis’, ‘conscientisation’, and ‘liberation’.98 She further states, ‘As one of, if not the most, influential images in education today, the ‘banking’ analogy provides us with clues to the contemporary character of the educational imaginary. The educational imaginary refers to the collection of images that enable us to picture what educational concepts like ‘teaching’, ‘studying’, and ‘learning’ are thought to mean.’99 After a thorough discussion of the concept of banking education, she writes, ‘My analysis of the ‘banking’ analogy is not a call for a return to traditional education – whatever in reality that turns out to be – but is instead a move forward in the advancement of dialogical pedagogy for the following reasons. First, it explains both the popularization of Freire’s educational philosophy and common misunderstandings of it. Second, it problematizes the discursive assumption that we know what traditional education and problem-posing education are; the analysis invites us to re-examine traditional education for aspects eclipsed by the ‘banking’ analogy and to give serious consideration to the nature of authentic dialogical authority. 302

FREIRE

Third, the aspects of traditional education eclipsed by the ‘banking’ analogy provide us resources for conceiving the character of authentic dialogical authority: it involves an exemplary unification of thinking, saying and doing; it involves the personal transformation resulting from any serious engagement; and it involves the individual expression of subjectivity in the very acknowledgement of another’s. It is by way of these insights that the distinction between traditional education and problemposing education, dichotomized and reified by the ‘banking’ analogy, begins to dissolve and make way for new and alternative resolutions of the educational terrain.’100 In a beautiful and emotional essay entitled ‘Freirean ‘Just Ire’, Health and ‘Poem-making’: A Letter from West Texas’, Virginia J. Mahan, the author, writes, ‘One last thing, Paulo...although you have on one level left us, you will steadfastly remain with educators, like me, who are your disciples. You are beside me whenever I denounce the racial discrimination at the Lubbock City Cemetery; the 40 hate groups in Texas; the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas; or legacy admissions, which give ‘preference’ and ‘special treatment’ – those things that opponents of affirmative action condemn — to children of alumni at Texas A&M and, thus, inequitably favour White applicants. You live on every time that I announce a more just U.S., and you are present on every occasion that my vigour wanes and I am tempted to renounce the task of ‘ethicizing the world’, bringing conscience into the knowledge process.’101 In “Dialogue on Teaching Practice and Praxis”, Elizabeth A. Galligan and Diane Pinkey, the authors, wrote: ‘Freire awakened us to a different vision of the role of the teacher and the learner with a vision of education as a process of empowerment’.102 The authors sought to discover Freire’s influence in their own works through a dialogical interaction whereby they related their respective experiences connecting Freire’s views on those issues. Elizabeth Galligan had been in Brazil during 1962–65 and had signed up as a literacy volunteer under Freire. She describes in vivid details the excitement of those times, the inspirational role of Paulo Freire and later on the military coup and the exile of Freire. She says, ‘Brazil changed my life and my politics in profound ways by understanding of class and oppression, race, power, and of myself.’103 She says further, “Paulo was smart enough to predict early on in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that there would be objections to his ideas. But when we saw him in person in 1996, he had not deviated from his commitment in any way, shape or form. He had deepened some of his previous positions but he hadn’t changed them. That, to me, is one of the very compelling things about being authentic. That’s the model for me. If there’s one thing that attracts me to transformative pedagogy, it’s not the theorizing, it’s not the research, nor constructing a theory that is solid and helpful, – it’s the authenticity; being congruent. It’s doing and being – in concert with others and yourself.’104 Belle Wallace wrote in her article entitled “A Vision of Paulo Freire’s Philosophy: Understanding His Essential Dynamism of Learning and Teaching” that she, as an educator, along with her students, tried to walk in the steps of Paolo Freire.105 Her journey was an international one. She describes her experience of working in 303

CHAPTER 4

KwaZulu/Natal, an enforced ‘homeland’ under the apartheid rule in South Africa. She says, ‘I have reflected for sometime about the influence that Paulo Freire has had on my professional and personal life, and decided to share with you as honestly and as clearly as I can how his philosophy has impacted on the decisions and actions I have taken over the last forty years as a school teacher, university lecturer, researcher, and national and international education consultant.’106 She confesses: ‘When my career first began in education, I was not aware of Freire’s writing and teaching.’107 But she discovered and applied Freire’s thoughts when she spent ‘an intensive and extensive period’ in Natal. Freire’s thinking on the power of literacy to forge or deny an access to learning and life opportunities is well known as one of his most fundamental premises, says Belle Wallace.108 In KwaZulu, the language of learning and teaching was English, while the mother-tongue of the students was Zulu. The majority of the students lived in homes where their parents were working away from home in the White towns, and they were cared for by older aunts and grandmothers who had received no formal schooling and whose English was sparse and colloquial, says Belle.109 Through the TASC project (Thinking Actively in Social Context), Belle Wallace and her co-researchers started a pilot project with 28 students of this community. Using Freirean methods, including the skill for problem-solving, they achieved a phenomenal success when all these students gained the highest matriculation results ever achieved by black students. All these students entered universities with bursaries to pay their fees and support their studies. In a follow-up meeting, all 28 students said that the first thing they had done on arriving at university was to set up a TASC Club so that they could teach fellow students the problem-solving and thinking strategies they had used to master their studies. Very poignantly, one student said, ‘I now believe that I belong in my own country, and that I can lead change’.110 Aly Juma, Octavio Augusto Pescador, Carlos Torres and Rich Van Heertum in their article entitled “The Educational Praxis of Paulo Freire: Translations and Interventions” wrote: ‘he endowed us with a legacy of writings and action that inspired generations of critical educators to explore the role of education in struggling against oppression and injustice. He was a pedagogue who expanded our perceptions of the world, nourished our will, enlightened our awareness of the causes and consequences of human suffering and illuminated the need to develop an ethical and utopian pedagogy of social change.’111 The authors in their bid to establish that Freirean methods are well-suited even in pre-primary stage, say: ‘It might seem at first hard to imagine dialogical, problem-solving methods translating well into a pre-school or kindergarten classroom.’112 They explain: ‘The field of early childhood education has been heavily influenced by human development theory and developmental psychology, resulting in a focus on the practices that can facilitate individual growth and learning within the context of Piaget’s stages of development and experiential expectations. Teaching and learning strategies within this framework are founded on age and skill appropriate curriculum that addresses the specific needs and capacities of children 304

FREIRE

at various levels of development. Absent from this theoretical foundation are critical sociological exploration of issues related to agency, power, policy and the state as they intersect with the multitude of historic, religious, ethnic, cultural, gendered and socio-political orientations.’113 The authors opine that, in opposition to the constructivist approach of individual understanding emanating from collective group activities, ‘Freirian pedagogy emphasizes collective learning as a means of challenging oppression in all its various manifestations. In the classroom, it involves using culture circles to name, reflect on and act on the forms of oppression toward the goal of liberation.’114 The authors also gave a detailed description of the work of PFI (Paulo Freire Institute) of UCLA in the community using Freire’s notion of hope, his pedagogical and philosophical insights and his belief in social transformation. Myriam N. Torres and Loui V.Reyes in their article “Resurrecting Democracy in Public Education through Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation and Hope” say: ‘In the context of Freire’s liberating education, participatory democracy, or what he calls radical democracy, means that stakeholders (teachers, parents, students, and community members) participate actively and on an equal footing in the most important decisions that determine the quality and relevance of education provided to the children, youth, and adult members of this society. Those decisions include policy-making (overaching goals, principles and strategies), school government, curricula, pedagogy, and evaluation criteria and approaches.’115 ‘For Freire,’ they say, ‘the dispossessed and marginalized are entitled to high quality education in which they participate on an equal footing in the identification and articulation of their own problems, and in the study and critical understanding of them through dialogue and democratic debate.’116 Expressing concern about NCLB policy, they write: ‘The latest U.S. federal education policy – No Child Left Behind (NCLB) — is just the tip of the iceberg concerning the invasion of schools and education in general system by the market ideology of corporate agenda. Following Freire’s teachings, we need to be able to ‘read the world’ before we are able to work toward its transformation. Currently, the ‘reading of the world’ requires us to understand critically how education has been highjacked by corporations. Emery and Ohanian’s extraordinary well-documented book has helped us to learn the concrete organizations, actions and purposes, with which business and corporations, for at least the last three decades, have invaded each pillar, corner and node of the school system. Their agenda is comprehensive, well-organised and funded, and above all relentless. It includes influencing and even determining standards, testing, textbooks, and educational materials, pedagogy, professional development, teacher education, and teacher accreditation through corporate endowed foundations, school boards, teachers’ unions, researchers, educators, parent organizations, and a system of rewards and punishments, etc.’117 They further add, ‘The values brought to education systems are the values of ‘market fundamentalism’ as Giroux argues.’118 ‘…Freire’s latest writings may be more helpful for tackling the new faces of oppression today,’ the authors declare. ‘Therefore, we argue for a Pedagogy of 305

CHAPTER 4

Indignation and Hope to start resurrecting democracy in schools and in society at large. This pedagogy consists by and large of two interrelated projects: denunciation and annunciation. The denunciation process refers to the deep comprehensive and critical understanding of the so-called ‘New World Order’ and how it impacts our lives and drives the current education reform. In dialectical relationship with the denunciation is the annunciation of the possibility of another world, more just, democratic, and humane in which people come before profit and are never used as means to achieve other people’s ends.’119 They add, ‘Contrary to the fatalist and immobilizing ideologies predicted by the newly allied neoliberals and conservatives, for whom the ‘free market’ is the solution to all human problems and the only good road to progress, and who believe globalization is inevitable, Freire announces with certainty the capability of humans for transforming the world, to comprehend and name their realities, to counteract fatalism, and to work toward liberation from those fatalist oppressing systems. He warns us that engaging in transforming the world, is hard today, and becomes harder every day, but it is possible.’120 ‘For Freire,’ the authors state, ‘changing the world is not possible without a dream or vision of a better world… Dreams are developed through dialogue and in solidarity with others willing to engage in collective actions in these struggles for a better world.’121 ‘Freire’s view of ethics is humanistic,’ the authors comment, ‘somewhat essential his critics would say, with a focus on justice, common good, human selfrealization, dignifying work, decent salaries, and social services, participatory democracy etc; that is, a society oriented to people not just merely to profits and material things.’ ‘What is the role of education in the world transformation?’ ask the authors. ‘Education is necessary but not sufficient to reinvent the future’, they opine referring to Freire’s work.122 In “Freire’s Legacy: A Hope for the XXI Century” Lucia Coral Aguirre Munoz, the author, tries to apply Freire’s thoughts in the domain of critical pedagogy. She has intended to establish a concrete context by addressing the circumstances we live in. She also wanted to bring forward an analysis of postmodernism as a theoretical context as Freire could have suggested since postmodernism in the present context is the dominant thinking among western intellectuals. Against western bourgeois postmodernism which is synonymous to privatization, liberalization and globalization, ‘the Critical or Progressive Postmodernism, as conceived by Freire, endorses all of the modern project’s limits but with a different spirit than the nihilistic one. Developed from a partial and banal reasoning, the Critical Postmodernism sets the acceptance of differences, the search for the other voice and the encounter with him through dialogue, as the unavoidable conditions to improve the present,’123 says the author. She adds that ‘Freire sets out to shake historical anesthesia off and overcome existential weariness in order to unfold suitable conditions for a new world. Things being what they are now, it is hard to foresee social change or transition without a fight, and Freire has warned it will be a fierce one.’124 306

FREIRE

‘If formal education is still trapped within the scheme of Modernism, young people on their part are more and more seduced and overwhelmed by the postmodern views, nihilist or critical, depending on what their life trajectory has been made of. Seen from this point of view, it is clear that education has an important role to play in developing a critical consciousness within the youth. It is up to educators to compensate for the flaws of the educational systems all around the world; and to do so, they just have to follow Fromm’s statement, which Freire repeatedly referred to, for whom educational practice must be put in force as a historical, socio-cultural and political psychoanalysis,’125 says Muñoz. Referring to Freire’s concept of dream and hope, the author says, ‘To rescue the human capacity to dream, to think of social alternatives, to establish communal bonds again, Freire proposed to build a Utopia, his own hope being as great as the times’ needs. To do so, it is necessary to develop a consciousness of the critical situation humanity is living in; it is imperative to stretch to what is feasible but hasn’t yet been done .Now, more than ever, hope is an ontological need; it is a matter of survival, not only for the North or the South, for the rich or the poor, but for all human specie. To become concrete history, this ontological requirement needs to be put in practice.’126 ‘Nowadays,’ says the author, ‘formal schooling has a limited impact on human formation, but still, even though the school is aimed to reproduce society as it is, to foster resistance using the institutional limitations is a step in the right direction. More importantly, we should move towards informal education through talks, creating, exploring dialogue spaces; and by doing so, to open oneself to other’s thoughts. The idea is not to perish in isolation,’ she says referring to Freire’s statements.127 ‘Cultural production may be a valuable means to oppose miseducation as generated by the mass-manupulation media,’ says the author.128 ‘To conclude,’ she says, ‘for Freire the alternative lies between an education for alienated domestication and education for freedom, that is to say, should educational practices strive to confine human beings as objects of History or as subjects of History.’129 Peter McLaren in his “Afterword” sought to find relevance of Freire’s theory and practice in the context of the present U.S politics and economy. He writes, ‘Charges … have been addressed by Paulo Freire, specifically in his magisterial book, Pedagogy of Hope, and they serve as an excellent resource for teachers, especially those in the United States are being labelled as “traitors” and “supporters of terrorism” because they use the classroom as spaces for critical dialogues about U.S. imperialism, the war in Iraq, political Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, the struggle for socialism, and other controversial topics, dialogues that are actually designed to create a well-informed public that can work towards a future world unmarked by terrorism. It is important for teachers to visit and revisit the work of an educator who, although we mark the tenth anniversary of his death, many of us still use as a compass for our pedagogical life, a life that does not end when the door to the classroom is closed for the day, but that we have integrated into our hearts and minds, and adapted to the everyday rhythm of our lives. He was an 307

CHAPTER 4

educator who championed academic freedom all of his life. For Freire, living in a culture of silence was tantamount to accepting injustice and defeat.’130 ‘Freire observes,’ says McLaren, ‘that educational practice reveals a “helplessness to be ‘neutral’”. There is, Freire argues, no “educational practice in zero spacetime”, that is, there is no neutral practice. This is because educators are disposed to be ethical agents engaged in educative practice that is directive, that is political, that, indeed, has a preference. Freire writes that as an educator, he must “live a life full of consistency between my democratic option and my educational practice, which is likewise democratic.” Freire agrees that we find authoritarianism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. Both groups can be reactionary in an “identical way” if they “judge themselves the proprietors of knowledge, the former, of revolutionary knowledge, the letter, of conservative knowledge.” Both forms of authoritarianism are elitist. Freire underscores the fact that we cannot “conscientize” students without at the same time being “conscientized” by them as well. Teaching should never, under any circumstances be a form of imposition. On the other hand, we cannot shrink from our democratic duty and fear to teach because of manipulation. We always run this risk and must do so willingly, as a necessary act, as a leap across a dialectical divide, that is necessary for any act of knowing to occur. This is why critical educators stress the idea of a hidden curriculum as a way of self-examination, of remaining coherent, of remaining tolerant and at the same time of becoming critically disposed in their teaching because, as Freire reminds us, tolerance breeds openness and critical disposition breeds curiosity and humanity.’131 McLaren further states ‘Freire makes it clear that we reject a “focalist” approach to students’ experiential knowledge and approach a student’s experiential knowledge contextually, inserting our respect for such knowledge “into the larger horizon against which it is generated – the horizon of cultural context, which cannot be understood apart from its class particularities and this indeed in societies so complex that the characterization of those peculiarities is less easy to come by. ‘Students’ experiences must be understood within the contextual and historical specificities in which such experiences are produced. They must be read dialectically against the larger totality in which they are generated. For Freire, the regional emerges from the local, the national emerges from the regional, the continental emerges from the national, and the worldwide emerges from the continental. He warns, “Just as it is a mistake to get stuck in the local, losing our vision of the whole, so also it is a mistake to waft above the whole, renouncing any reference to the local when the whole has emerged”. We are universalists, yes, because we struggle for universal human rights, for economic justice worldwide, but we begin from somewhere, from concrete spaces and places where subjectivities are forged and commodified (and we hope de-commodified) and where critical agency is developed in particular and distinct ways. And when Freire speaks of a struggle to build a utopia… a utopia grounded in the present, always operating “from the tension between the denunciation of a present becoming more and more intolerable, and the “annunciation”, announcement, of a future to be created, built, — politically, esthetically, and ethically — by us women and men.’132 308

FREIRE

McLaren further states that it is important to dream of a better world – since dreaming is “a necessary political act, it is an integral part of the historico-social manner of being a person …part of human nature, which, within history, is in permanent process of ‘becoming’ — we need to remember that ‘there is no dream without hope.’”133 NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

Stanley M. Grabowski (ed), Paulo Freire, A Revolutionary Dilemma for the Adult Educator, Syracuse University, USA, 1972. Ibid, preface. Ibid, p. 1. Ibid, p. 1. Ibid, pp. 2–3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 16. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 26. Ibid, p. 27. Ibid, p. 27. Ibid, p. 27. Ibid, pp. 36–37. Ibid, p. 42. Ibid, p. 44. Ibid, p. 44. Ibid, p. 44. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 57. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 84. Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 86. Ibid, pp. 86–87. Ibid, p. 87. Ibid, p. 87. Ibid, p. 88. Ibid, p. 89. Adult Education and Development, Unesco Institute of Education,Hamburg Number 69, Hamburg, 2007, p. 1. Ibid, p. 2. 309

CHAPTER 4 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 7. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 18. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, p. 32. Ibid, p. 38. Ibid, p. 43. Ibid, p. 46. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 47. Ana Maria Araujo Freire, “Paulo Freire: To touch, To look, To listen”. In Convergence, International Council of Adult Education, Vol. xxxi, 1998, 1 & 2, Toronto, Canada, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, pp. 4–5. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, p. 11. Ibid, p. 11. Ibid, p. 12. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 17. Ibid, pp. 17–18. Ibid, pp. 18–19. Ibid, pp. 19–20. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, pp. 21–22. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, p. 22. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid, pp. 23–24. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, pp. 30–31. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 83. Ibid, p. 89.

310

FREIRE 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

Ibid, p. 90. Michael F. Schaughnessy et al (ed), Pioneers in Education, Essays in Honor of Paulo Freire, Nova Science Publishers, Inc., New York, 2008, pp. 1–2. Ibid, p. 2. Ibid, p. 3. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, p. 10. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 36. Ibid, p. 41. Ibid, p. 52. Ibid, p. 60. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 68. Ibid, p. 72. Ibid, p. 72. Ibid, p. 80. Ibid, p. 85. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid, p. 90. Ibid, p. 90. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 118. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid, p. 123. Ibid, p. 123. Ibid, p. 124. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, p. 140. Ibid, pp. 140–141. Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, p. 142. Ibid, p. 146. Ibid, p. 146. Ibid, p. 147. Ibid, p. 148.

311

Paulo Freire: Rousseau of the Twentieth Century

Paulo Freire para Educadores

Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter

Paulo Freire (Continuum Library Of Educational Thought)

Paulo Freire: Teaching for Freedom and Transformation: The Philosophical Influences on the Work of Paulo Freire (Explorations of Educational Purpose)

Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution

Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Music of the Twentieth Century

The Long Twentieth Century

The Twentieth Century

Encyclopedia of twentieth-century photography

The Call of the Twentieth Century

The Plains Indians of the twentieth century

Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Prominent Tajik Figures of the Twentieth Century

Australian Piano Music of the Twentieth Century

The Confessions of Rousseau

Twentieth Century Advertising

Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians

Twentieth Century Actor Training

Mathematical Events of the Twentieth Century

Mathematical events of the twentieth century

Paulo Freire: Rousseau of the Twentieth Century

Paulo Freire para Educadores

Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter

Paulo Freire (Continuum Library Of Educational Thought)

Paulo Freire: Teaching for Freedom and Transformation: The Philosophical Influences on the Work of Paulo Freire (Explorations of Educational Purpose)

Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution

Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Music of the Twentieth Century

The Long Twentieth Century

The Twentieth Century

Encyclopedia of twentieth-century photography

The Call of the Twentieth Century

The Plains Indians of the twentieth century

Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Prominent Tajik Figures of the Twentieth Century

Australian Piano Music of the Twentieth Century

The Confessions of Rousseau

Twentieth Century Advertising

Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians

Twentieth Century Actor Training

Mathematical Events of the Twentieth Century

Mathematical events of the twentieth century

Recommend Documents