JAC Volume 17 Issue 3

The first time I met Paulo Freire, we'd all gone out for supper at a Portuguese restaurant in East Cambridge—all of us from UMass-Boston where Paulo had beef lecturing. I remember Judy Goleman, Neal Bruss, Donaldo Macedo, but there were others. Paulo amused us with a tale of going with an anthropologist into the Brazilian hinterlands where he'd been welcomed according to custom. That custom was to rub an evil-smelling concoction into his beard. "Culturally," he said, leaning back in his chair, his arms spread out on the backs of the chairs next to him, "it was vairy, vairy interesting . . . but personally, it was vairy, vairy uncomfortable." I was considering to myself how rare it would be for an ethnographer to report so candidly when Paulo looked across the table directly at me, over the pork and rabbit casserole—which was culturally very interesting and culinarily left much to be desired—and asked: "Does anybody know a book called "Forming-a, Thinking-a, Writing-a?" They say I levitated right to the ceiling. I knew that my friend Joseph Summers had given him a copy of my textbook, to hear but/that he actually had looked inside it was—well, that was a memorable moment. "I can tell you right where it is on my book shelf," Paulo said.

I had first heard his name more than ten years before when I had only recently arrived at UMB after years of teaching at elite colleges. I had found that teaching "the new student" was a fascinating challenge and, because I had been very active in the peace movement in Philadelphia (and continued to be in Massachusetts), I saw the challenge in political terms. My colleagues and I had invented a course called "The Intellectual Confronts the Social Order." The reading list for my section was terrific: Man's Fate, Bread and Wine, Homage to Catalonia, John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem in Terris, and, at the insistence of a student who said she would otherwise refuse to read the Pope, the Black Panther People's Party's founding charter. I believed that I was meeting the challenge and I had indeed learned how to elicit discussion—rather easy since one student was a Maoiste from Paris, another a Spaniard whose uncle was the confessor to the future king of Spain,a young man who had no knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and was reading about it for the first time in Orwell. But something was wrong: the writing I got was terrible. In another newly-invented course, I began experimenting with having students learn to generate chaos and find ways to order it, to observe and then to observe their observations—to think about their thinking; to classify by understanding the opposition of the two terms of a definition. I was bragging to my colleague George Slover about all this and he said, "That sounds like Paulo Freire."

So I began reading this man, starting with the Harvard Educational Review essays translated by Loretta Slover. I discovered that everything Paulo Freire was saying about language and learning was consonant with what I knew from Vygotsky, Sapir, Langer, and Richards—the guides I'd chosen to help me find ways to teach in this new environment. But there was something else: Freire was validating (a big word in the '70s) what I'd been doing. The beautiful meditation on his childhood discovery that reading the word is analogous to reading the world provided invaluable support for an idea I'd gathered from I. A. Richards, that perception, understood as "primordial abstraction," is the model of all acts of mind, "the all-in-each of human nature" as Coleridge said. Furthermore, in showing how critical reflection becomes praxis, Freire was demonstrating the importance of sequence and the simultaneity of the how and the what. Inventions like "the card of discovery" brought "skills" and meaning-making together and kept them together.

I began to proselytize, organizing a workshop for a College English Association meeting with Dixie Goswami; and soon after, one for the CCCC. The chief principles of the pedagogy of knowing I identified as "problematizing the existential situation," generative words, dialogue as "the encounter between men to name the world," and conscientization, critical consciousness, which was a far cry from the usual consciousness-raising exercises of the day. Like all missionaries, I was self-righteous: I thought that I saw more clearly than most others the importance of Paulo Freire for teachers of rhetoric and composition. It was outrageous to find my colleagues at UMB and elsewhere proceeding to talk about the contemptible banking theory of education while they continued to teach in exactly that style. They asked their students, "Do you know you're oppressed?" They thought that having everybody sit on the (filthy) floors dramatized the equality of teacher and taught. They went on and on about the pedagogy of the oppressed without a clue about the role of dialogue, with no idea of the heuristic uses of syntax, to say nothing of the heuristic value of composing in paragraphs. Theory and practice remained alien to one another because the theory had not been understood.¹

In 1981, in a NEH Summer Seminar I directed at UMB, "Philosophy and the Composing Process," I had the seminarians read Freire; Loretta came in to tell us about the primers used in the culture circles. The same year, Bob Boynton published The Making of Meaning, a collection of my talks followed by passages from Montessori and Ashton-Warner, Whitehead and William James, Jane Addams, Richards, Tolstoy—and Paulo Freire, the most important of all. I like to think that finding him in this company led many who would not have read him otherwise to discover his importance.

In 1984, Paulo visited UMB and we were all inspirited by his presence. He has not always been well-served by his translators and his writing is often graceless, suffering the effects of seeing things in both Christian and Marxist perspectives. It was therefore a revelation to hear him speak, discovering that the rhythm of his discourse was not that of a tract but of a virtual dialogue as he reflected on the meanings he was framing. We decided to take advantage of this style and prepared questions beforehand. The result was the most thrilling and cogent presentation anyone could remember.

The next year when Paulo was to speak at the Kennedy Library, I was asked to introduce him. While the overflow crowd was being managed, we waited with others in a suite of rooms overlooking Boston Harbor. As he stood silently, restlessly by the tall windows, I thought of how the lecturer's role was the antithesis of those he had chosen in culture circles and seminar rooms, and I hoped that our plan of pre-chosen questions from the audience, after his brief remarks, would assure that what he had to say would be a virtual dialogue. This scheme would also co-opt the ranters who would be unstoppable once they were on their feet. "We hope," I said in concluding my introduction, "that this exchange will be a virtual conversation in which we can all participate." It was not perceived that way by some. When Freire's remarks ended and the questioners began, a note was passed to me on stage—an outraged, furious demand to be heard. So I called on this message-sender and the expectable obfuscation ensued. The next day, this same man pedagogy of knowing' when sent me a memo: "Why do you keep talking about Paulo Freire's subject as `the pedagogy of the oppressed'?" It was exhilarating to answer him by pointing out that "the pedagogy of knowing" is Freire's phrase, not mine, and that without that idea, "the pedagogy of the oppressed" is a sterile slogan.

Without understanding that the pedagogy of the oppressed is a pedagogy of knowing, we are defenceless against arguments like this one of Robin Tolmach Lakoff:

For one thing, literacy has never been "essential for simple survival." (Never forget that Charlemagne was illiterate—and what percentage of the world's population survives, simply, without letters?) This statement could not possibly be made by anyone with an understanding of the liberatory role of literacy.

It must be said that talk about the philosophy of language can be galling to those stalwart supporters of efforts to change, to transform society, from the actions of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to the programs of liberatory groups in this country. Nevertheless, Paulo Freire did not win his world-wide reputation as an authentic (and dangerous) revolutionary because he declared that "poor people suffer because of the malevolence of those in power," as a Boston Globe reporter put it recently. The Brazilian government did not send him into exile because he was bad-mouthing the landowners. Paulo Freire was dangerous because he made change seem possible to the peasants. His revolutionary praxis depended on his passionate belief that the oppressed can move towards liberation, can begin to take power, NOT because they can recognize the letters of the alphabet and NOT because they can read but because they know THAT they are literate. The experience of recreating their language becomes the model for transformation of the world they inhabit. The power source is their reclaimed imagination: they can envisage real change in their lives because they have experienced real change in the literacy process. Conscientization must be demystified: critical reflection is an act; it is praxis; it is transformation. Paulo tells us in The Politics of Education that he rediscovered this truth by becoming"a tramp of the obvious." I quoted this in introducing him; he'd forgotten saying it and asked for my text to use on the occasion of his inauguration as minister of education in the newly liberated government of Brazil. It was a pleasure to return to Paulo his own words.

The failure to appreciate the importance of Freire's philosophy of language is critical because it is the logical obverse of his philosophy of Man. His understanding of human beings as historical creatures who must continually create and recreate their knowledge. At a time when universals are derided as the detritus of hegemonic orders, it is gratifying to find Paulo Freire willing and able to talk about the powers of language shared by all members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, the creature who knows that he knows. Of course the universals which define us must be in dialectic with the particular contexts of our lives. As Paulo said in recent interview, "I was born and now live in the city of Recife, in northeast Brazil. . . . I am a `northeast' man, but I am also a Brazilian, a Latin American, and a man of the world. But my `northeasterness' may explain my way of thinking." I would guess that Paulo would have assented to Sarah Orne Jewett's remark to Willa Cather: "One must know the world well before one can know one's own parish." The crucial point is that the particular and the universal meet in the individual, whether he is called Representative Man or the child of the Lord. Freire always finds the meeting point of the present moment and history, finds in each individual man or woman a representation of humanity.

When the current pope called the worker priests back to the altar, Paulo rejected "these men of the Middle Ages." He rejected the liberal church as well as the traditional church, reminding us that in their stead we should seek the prophetic church. This is the meaning of Liberation Theology whose chief beacon he has been. His gift to us all is the realized hope that there is a third way in all realms. I closed a review of The Politics of Education with the following comment which sets forth what I most value in the work—and life—of Paulo Freire: