The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that nurtures conscientização – critical consciousness – and encourages participation in political struggles. According to a 2016 study, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” was the third most cited book in the social sciences. As Daniel Schugurensky writes in his 2011 intellectual biography of Freire, “no other educational thinker from the global south has attracted such wide international attention to his or her ideas.”
Yet Freire’s legacy remains a contentious issue in contemporary Brazil. The Brazilian right tends to portray Freire as a dangerous subversive who planned to indoctrinate the youth. The right-wing administration of President Jair Bolsonaro has used this misleading caricature to justify its assault on public education.
In speeches and interviews, Bolsonaro and his allies represent Freire as a kind of leftist boogeyman whose influence needs to be purged from the Brazilian education system. On his campaign trail, Bolsonaro boasted to his supporters that he would “enter the education ministry with a flamethrower to remove Paulo Freire.” Abraham Weintraub, Bolsonaro’s now former minister of education (he recently left for a contentious position at the World Bank), blamed Freire for Brazil’s poor education rankings and likened Freirean pedagogy to “voodoo without scientific proof.” Similarly, Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, who is known as “Bolsonaro’s guru,” dismisses Freire as a “pseudo-intellectual militant” who produced “a collection of tricks to reduce education to sectarian indoctrination.”
